Somewhere Far Beyond
by Col. Sayaka Miki
Summary: When the rules of the universe are rewritten one time too many, Saldor, the Servant of the King, takes Homura Akemi prisoner. Now, Madoka and her friends journey across the stars to save their immortal enemy from a force somewhere far beyond them all. Time and space have little meaning to their new foe, the creator of the Incubators, from outside the universe.
1. The Call Of Saldor

_You are a toy, dear child. A plaything of some cosmic entity that cares not for you in the slightest. You are a fragile tool being used by an incompetent master to reach trivial goals. Nothing you do has worth, and nothing you can ever do could ever have worth. And what's more, you will never achieve the goals you have set before yourself. You are the true definition of deluded idiocy. It pains me to know that such a sickly, empty, and aimless soul exists and allows itself to conceive that it is the ultimate power. **YOU DON'T KNOW POWER.  
**_

_I, Saldor, the lowest of our King's servants, will put this self-proclaimed devil in her place. When I am through with you, you will have only begun to comprehend what lies beyond._

* * *

Three girls walked along the hallway at school. In the middle was a short girl with pink pigtails done up in yellow ribbons, who was smiling contentedly. On her right was a taller blue-haired girl who was doing most of the talking. On the left was a girl with long dark hair tied back by a red ribbon, a lazy smile on her face. These were Madoka Kaname, Sayaka Miki, and Homura Akemi respectively.

Sayaka kept talking, totally carefree. "...and when I looked back, she had fallen in the river! Hahaha! Of course, she managed to get the apple back. Kyoko is just the craziest when it comes to food."

Madoka was paying attention, but she knew Sayaka would keep talking either way, so she stayed quiet. Homura was just enjoying spending time with Madoka. Whatever Sayaka was saying meant nothing to her.

They continued walking, and Sayaka continued talking. "So now we're all meeting up again at the arcade because Kyoko wants to take back her high score from Hitomi. Who knew Hitomi was so good at those dance games? I sure didn't expect it. Oh, I was supposed to ask if you two wanted to join us. Hitomi said she'd pay for the first pizza, seeing how Kyoko's going to run out of money trying to beat that score. Mami is bringing Nagisa, too, so I'm going to see if we can use her cuteness to lower the prices on anything... Madoka?"

Homura opened her eyes and looked back. Sayaka had stopped walking before her, and was also looking back. Madoka had stopped when she noticed something unusual. There were other students in the hallway, and they were all gathered at the windows, looking down into yard in front of the school. Madoka walked over to the window and looked out. Her hands went to her mouth as she gasped.

Rushing to her side, Sayaka looked down and quickly jumped back in shock and surprise. "What the hell?"

Homura stepped to the window, looking down to see... fourteen little bodies laying on the ground, torn to shreds, the ground red with blood. A thousand variations of the basest emotions went through her, contorting her face. Those bodies... it was the Clara Dolls. She looked up to the sky. The day was bright. Cheery, even. If her control over this world was being threatened, she should expect at least some rain. But there wasn't anything of the sort.

"What the hell is going on?"

Kyubey appeared on the windowsill beside her. "You're being ousted. About time, too. Your self-destructive grip on this universe cannot be allowed to continue. No single-minded being such as yourself should ever have power over so much, yet you claim domain over an entire universe and care only for one individual within it. This has angered... _my creators_."

Homura grimaced. "Your creators, huh? Who are they, the Time Lords?"

Kyubey's face was expressionless. It bothered Homura, as she was certain she'd broken him. "I recall that term being used before. These Time Lords you speak of are a construction of Human imagination. Suffice it to say, you are incapable of comprehending the true extent of what you are facing. For every creature that is so far above another to be unimaginable, there is another so far above it. There is a theoretical end to this ladder, but my kind is not even remotely close enough to that end to even know for sure it exists. Even our creators are unaware if this pattern does or does not continue on endlessly. To paraphrase these so-called Time Lords, '_You_ have prayed to lesser beings.'"

Homura shouted at the Incubator, causing several other students to jump in surprise. "Shut up! Let me think."

Kyubey didn't even flinch at the outburst, no longer afraid of her. "Whatever you are doing, I hardly call it thinking. Last we met, Homura Akemi, you had me at a great disadvantage. This is no longer the case. _I do understand now._ I understand everything about what you are, what you claim to be, and what you actually believe yourself to be. I understand all your emotions, and have thus come to one conclusion. Not only by the standards of my race, but even your own, you are sick."

"NO!"

The world shattered around her, revealing an endless expanse of cracked asphalt. Boiling tar bubbled up from the cracks in the ground. Countless people, students, her classmates, scurried around her in fright. To them, this was a nightmare. Homura's eyes darted around, searching the crowd. She saw a terrified Madoka curled up on the ground. She turned back to Kyubey, who remained staring up at her.

"Let her go! She's not the one you want! I am!"

Kyubey didn't waver. "You are wrong. You are the one we _don't_ want. When Madoka Kaname created the Law of Cycles, she lessened the rate at which new energy was created, but you stopped it entirely. What she did was for the benefit of all, and actually worked. She could be hailed as the savior of your entire universe, creating a way for us to fend off entropy while simultaneously disallowing the annihilation of Human souls. I can understand now how this is preferable. You, on the other hand, saw fit to disregard not only the continuation of souls entirely, but to ignore the universe outside of your precious Mitakihara. The universe you shaped was made with rules you cast aside in favor of what you alone want, condemning it all to a slow and increasingly painful death. A death that, if left to yourselves, only you and Madoka Kaname would survive to witness, and then you would suffer greater pain than has ever been known to exist."

Homura found it hard to think of something to say in response. "I just... don't understand."

"I know." Kyubey's tail flicked, telling her that he was enjoying this. "I'll admit that the Incubators were meddling with forces we did not fully understand, and it is our incompetence that led to this result in the first place. I'll even admit that there were certainly better ways to go about it that we deemed too complex to attempt in spite of how much more efficient they would have been. What's more, I will admit that the salvation of your universe was ultimately technically not large enough of a concern to justify our taking action to begin with. But I know you cannot blame us now." Floating off the ground as if it was natural, Kyubey hovered in front of her face. "After all, without us you never would have met Madoka in the first place."

Resenting herself for it, Homura quickly got caught up in argument with the creature. "We would have ended up in the same class."

"No, you wouldn't. Without us, without Magical Girls, and without Witches, nothing you know in your world would be the same. Without the wishes of Magical Girls past, your society would be another two hundred and forty-nine years back in technological advancement. As a result of inferior medical technology, your previous heart condition would have killed you. That wouldn't matter, as due to complications Madoka Kaname would never have survived being born. Again, you see how we have influenced Human civilization's growth in ways you forget in an instant. We are the reason your race never wiped itself out of existence. The interesting thing is, to be completely honest, your universe was never so important that we had to save it at all."

Tiring, Homura gave in. "Then... what now? You kill me and leave the universe? Set things back to Madoka's Law of Cycles? Or does it go back to the way it was originally, with Witches? What?"

"None of that." Kyubey shook his head, a rare sight. "No, now we take a new path. You warp something so far out of its original shape, it cannot go back. My creators are coming into this universe to make things right. I was surprised to learn this, as they would not normally risk causing damage to the fabric of space. You have surpassed the power of a class one Incubator, and thus made yourself a credible threat, and because of this they are coming here to mete out an appropriate punishment."

At this information, Homura's hands balled into fists. "No! I will not allow you to take Madoka away from me!" Drawing her bow, she aimed it at the Incubator's head.

Kyubey's eyes flashed, and the bow melted in her hands. "It will not be so easy anymore, Homura Akemi. I have been upgraded to a class three, now invulnerable to anything I am capable of causing. This means that, as Madoka's powers stem from wishes I granted, and your powers stem now from her, you cannot harm me. By proxy, of course, my creators cannot be harmed either. I do not envy you whatever fate they have planned, but I do not pity you either."

"I don't want your damn pity. I can still defeat you. I'll find a way! Somehow!"

"Stop me. Defeat me and my creators. Do that, and you condemn Madoka Kaname to the worst fate imaginable."

In a fit of rage, Homura reached out and grabbed the creature's head in her hands. "If I cannot kill you with magic, then I will kill you with pure unadulterated Human violence! I'll kill them all!" She crushed his head, feeling the squishy red matter that made up his insides seep through her fingers. "Damn you all! I cannot be destroyed! I will not! Let them come!"

**_I AM COME._**

Homura reeled at the roaring voice in her head. Turning, and looking up, she saw a mass of writhing tentacles towering over her. Every squirming limb seemed to burn with an intense heat, and slitted green eyes bulged from between them at intervals more than tens of meters apart. Somewhere, the slimy abomination's organic matter shifted state to a thick white mist that formed a colossal maw of teeth. Clawed limbs stretched from the main body, snapping at the air without purpose. Everything, at her gaze, fixed itself in Homura's direction.

**_I AM SALDOR - SERVANT OF THE KING. ETHERNAL BELLIGERENT TO BLISSFUL ARROGANCE DESCENDS. SUCH HEMOFANTASIA OF NECROMANIA DEFIES RIGHT. PUNISHMENT OWNED BY HERETICAL SHE TO NEPHILISUS BANISHED._**

Untangling itself from the mass, one tentacle made its way down to her, green eye affixed to the end. The eye was a perfect sphere that she estimated to be three times her height in diameter.

**_IN SHORT, THIS UNIVERSE IS NOW MINE. YOU, HOMURA, ARE SENTENCED TO THE HELLCHAINS OF THE OLD ONES, IMPRISONED AT THE TOP OF THE EXTRA-UNIVERSAL CAVERNS OF FIRE UNTIL YOUR INSANITY IS BURNED FROM EVERY INCH OF YOUR BEING. AFTER COUNTLESS AEONS YOU MAY FINALLY BE ALLOWED TO RETURN TO A UNIVERSE, BUT NOT THIS ONE._**

The slit in the eye widened, and Homura was sucked into the darkness of it, screaming as she fell. Inspecting the universe from an inside view, Saldor commented on his new domain.

**_I SEE RULES THAT MUST BE REWRITTEN. STARS THAT MUST BE PUT OUT. GALAXIES THAT MUST BE REPLACED. MY WORK BEGINS NOW._**


	2. Kriemhild Gretchen

A calm day in early Summer. A university professor finishes her lecture.

"...and so we see that... clearly... gravity as we know it should not be acting this way. Feel free to copy down everything here on the board. It's all stuff in my book, and as it is knowledge I consider it free to everyone. That's why my book is free." The class laughed. "Now, are there any questions?"

A young student raised her hand. The teacher pointed up at her, and she stood. "You said gravity shouldn't be acting that way, so why is it?"

The teacher shrugged. "That's what we're trying to find out."

The student prodded further. "Well, then the lensing effect in the photograph. Why is gravity acting this way? Why can't we see what's behind that galaxy when we can clearly see things behind every other galaxy, and why are we so sure there's something behind it to see?"

The teacher grinned. "Clever, Miss Tomoe. Very clever. With the specialized telescope made by Professor Heinrich Asaschov in 2042, with instruments crafted by Doctor Rodney McKay throughout the 2020's, and through the lens developed by our own school's Dean Suzumiya in 2038. With these, we can determine that there is indeed something within a range of seven to twenty billion lightyears directly behind Galaxy L Abel 275 with between three and five times the mass of our own galaxy by gauging the relative effects on... well, everything else in the universe."

Tomoe nodded. "Okay, so why can't we see it through the lensing effect?"

The teacher took a step back, looking over her shoulder at the board. "Hmm... I don't know. Maybe someone doesn't want us to see it."

The class gave a little laugh at the notion. Tomoe pushed her on a bit more, jokingly now. "Who?"

"God, maybe?"

* * *

Madoka Kaname walked down the steps of the university, heading to her car, when a voice called her attention.

"Professor Kaname!" A young woman with blonde hair done into familiar twin drills ran down the stairs to greet her. "I want to thank you for today. Your work in the field is absolutely brilliant, and I can't say enough how much of an honor it is to be in your class. I look forward to it every day."

Madoka chuckled, shaking her head. "You're very flattering, Miss Tomoe. Is that all, or..."

The girl shook her head. "Oh, no. I was wondering if you wanted to go for lunch. There are a lot of questions I want to ask you that are a bit more... well, they're a little different from what I feel is appropriate to ask in class."

Madoka laughed, getting into her car and pushing the passenger side door open. "I like you, Tomoe, but not like that."

Getting in, the girl gave her an odd look. "That's not what I mean at all. I... I'm just saying it would probably be more of a conversation, and it wouldn't be fair to the other students if we got that going in the middle of class."

Madoka pulled out the keyboard and pressed the start up button. She waved off the girl's look. "I know. It was a joke. Where do you want to go? We've got the rest of the day, unless you have plans."

Tomoe shook her head. "Oh, I'm not busy. Uh... Swiss Chalet?"

"Alright..." Madoka keyed in the name of the place, and a holographic map appeared on the windshield displaying routes to three locations within the area. She tapped on one of them, and the other two routes disappeared. Pushing the keyboard back into the dashboard, she pulled up the steering wheel and pressed her foot down on the accelerator. As they pulled away, she smiled over at her student. "Your Mami's daughter, aren't you?"

The girl nodded, still smiling. "Yes I am. Charlotte Tomoe. My mother has mentioned you on occasion. When she heard I was in your class, you should have heard her. She holds you in quite high regard. She would have come up here to meet you, but you know how she is."

Madoka shook her head. "No, I don't, actually. What do you mean?"

Charlotte was taken aback. "Oh, you don't know? She's terrified of space. She'd never make the trip to Venus."

Understanding, Madoka nodded. "Ah, okay. I knew her in middle school and through high school. They only started making commercial flights off Earth about twenty years ago. I guess since before you were born, so it must seem like something that's always been around for you."

Charlotte smiled. "I guess. Just another day in the fifties for me."

Madoka nodded, glancing over every now and then. "So how is she? Your mother, that is."

"Oh, she's fine. She's doing government work with my aunt." Charlotte stopped, laughed, and corrected herself. "Sorry, she's not really my aunt. I just call her Aunt Sayaka cause I've grown up with her always being there. She was always good friends with my mom, since middle school... I guess you probably know her."

Madoka shook her head, smiling. "Ah, that sounds like Sayaka. She's a childhood friend of mine. We knew each other long before we met Mami. What's she doing?"

Charlotte braced herself against the dashboard as the car stopped abruptly in the parking lot. "Sayaka? She's in the military. She runs a counter-terrorism group, and my mom covers all the legal details of their job. They mostly deal with the American Resurgence Interior Alliance trying to reclaim their lost territory. My parents live in Texas right now, and Sayaka mostly stays with them when she's not working."

Madoka opened the door and got out. "How is that going? I haven't been back to Earth since I was... oh, twenty-one? Yeah, I think that's right." Charlotte got out and followed Madoka into the restaurant. Madoka continued. "So how are they doing wrapping up after the war?"

Charlotte sighed. "It's a long process, but the government is taking great strides. Texas got its independence years ago, and the Northwest is all part of Canada now. Alaska too. Everything else is still up in the air. Negotiations could be going faster, but I suppose they could be going slower too."

Madoka held the door open for the younger woman. "Let's just have dessert." She let the door swing closed behind them. "I'm thinking I'll have a sundae. A strawberry super sundae. You?"

Charlotte shrugged. "Apple pie."

By the time they reached the counter, the food was ready. They took their desserts to an unoccupied table and sat down. They took a few moments to quietly eat before Charlotte broke the silence.

"What exactly makes you so interested in whatever is behind L Abel 275?"

Madoka looked up, slightly surprised. "Hmm? Oh, I don't know... it's just intriguing is all. I just... I guess I'm just curious. It's a mystery." Charlotte stared blankly at her until she gave in. "Okay, have you ever felt like something is your calling? Like there's this journey or discovery that it feels like it's calling to you personally? That's what I feel when I look at that galaxy and see that there is a mystery about it. Something is behind it and... I just feel like, whatever it is, it's calling to me."

Charlotte sat back, thinking about her words. "I get it, I think... So what do you think is behind there? What do you think is so important God would hide it from us?"

Madoka sighed. "That was a joke. I don't really think God is hiding something from us. I don't believe in God."

"Well I do. Or at least I don't see why it's not possible." The student reached forward and grabbed the last piece of her pie, popping it into her mouth. "Besides, the most reasonable explanation for why Abel isn't bending the light for us to see is that someone doesn't want us to see it."

Madoka shook her head. "No, that's not true. I mean, I suppose it could be someone's intention to hide it from us, but why? Anyway, it's far more likely that whatever is behind Abel just doesn't emit any light to begin with."

"Like what?"

"I don't- like a super-massive pile of dark matter. The possibilities are limitless. We don't know, and we won't know for a long time. All we can do is speculate. We'll never know for sure, at least in our lifetime." Madoka let out her breath and sat back, glancing around the restaurant. "It would be nice. Certainly would be nice. But it's not going to happen."

Charlotte nodded. "Fair enough, but we are a speculative people. If we don't have our speculations, what do we have?"

Madoka raised the glass her sundae was in as if she was raising a toast. "At least we still have our looks."

"Is that what you've surmised?" Charlotte laughed.

Madoka set the glass down again. "It is my unbiased professional opinion."

Everything went black. An empty consciousness found itself alone in the middle of a void. Somewhere, a voice cried out quietly.

"_Madoka..._"

Madoka opened her eyes. She was cold, shivering all over. Black crushed her vision, threatening to send her back to oblivion.

Charlotte put her hand on Madoka's shoulder. "Professor! Professor Kaname! Can you hear me? Someone, call an ambulance! She's gone into convulsions! Oh God, no! Please, no!"

Madoka coughed violently. She tried to stand up, but suddenly found that gravity was wrong. Her face landed on a hard surface. More voices, but they were small and insignificant squabbling voices. She wanted then to shut up.

"Oh my god, is she okay?"

"No she's not okay! What are you staring at her for? Call a fucking ambulance!"

Nothing she could see made sense. Nothing she could hear made sense. She couldn't feel anything. Every time she tried to move, her body went the other way. She wanted up, but the gravity she felt said one direction was up and the way she fell said another. She was lost in some torturous place she didn't know. So she did the only thing she could do.

She screamed.

The scream of a woman can travel far, but only so far. Lots of people can hear it. It's loud. It's shrill. It signals danger.

The scream of a witch is different. It becomes a physical force, a shockwave, that can damage solid objects and harm or even kill people. The bigger the witch, the worse it is.

* * *

Colonel Sayaka Miki watched out the front view port of the shuttle. "What the hell is that?"

Ahead of her, the planet Venus cracked open. Jets of flames and molten core poured into what was left of the atmosphere. The entire planet was shaking, splitting up, launching chunks of the crust into space. She would have thought it very cool if she had not several people on the planet she cared for deeply. The sight shook her to her core.

"Madoka..."

Something on the broken surface moved with a purpose. A massive column of black twisted and writhed, reaching higher and higher as it grew. She pressed a hand over her mouth to keep from sobbing out loud.

The shadow of Kriemhild Gretchen continued to grow until the planet crumbled to smoldering dust.

* * *

_**YOU WHINE VERY LOUDLY, SHE-DEVIL. SHE HEARS YOU. SHE HAS AWOKEN, AND SHE IS COMING FOR YOU. BUT SHE COMES NOT AS A RESCUER. NO, SHE COMES WITH HUNGER!**_

Saldor's colossal grip clamped shut the hole Homura Akemi had ripped open in the universe.

_**SHOULD I LET HER FIND AND DEVOUR YOU? SHOULD I TOY WITH HER? WHAT TO DO...**_


	3. The Witches' Mission

Tendrils of shadow wrapped around the shuttle, crushing on its hull until Sayaka feared it would pop like a balloon. A young man, the pilot, sat convulsing in the seat beside her. He was bleeding from nearly everywhere. The presence of the witch was overpowering. Others further back in the shuttle were in pain, but had not yet been exposed to as much as the ones right at the view port. She pitied them, only wishing they had been granted the seemingly miraculous resistance that she appeared to possess. There was only one thing she could do for them now.

Drawing the decorative blade from her side, she drove it through the pilot's heart. He stopped moving. She struggled back to where others were writhing in pain, barely managing to stumble in the right direction with the ship shaking so much. One after another, she ended their lives in the quickest way she knew how. There was nothing else she could do for them. A slaughter. A mercy. And then it was down to her alone. There was no way out but one.

Kneeling down in the center of the deck, she placed a hand on a nearby seat to stabilize herself. "This... isn't how I thought I would go." But she wasn't interested in facing whatever was doing this to the ship, neither was she interested in dying in the cold of space. "I had so much left to..."

Sayaka angled her sword into her chest and pulled it into herself.

Blood filled the shuttle, pooling on the deck. It wasn't until Sayaka fell face first in it that she was shaken back awake. Pressing her hands against the deck, she pushed herself out of the red. Her face and hair were dripping with blood, and the level of it covered her hands up to her wrists. Eyes wide with horror, she pulled her hands out of the grisly sea and sat up. Looking down, she saw the sword sticking out of her chest. The blood was still pouring from her.

The ship shook again. She grimaced, grabbing the sword's hilt and twisting it. She at least wanted to be unconscious when the shuttle broke open, but it wasn't enough. The pain was unbearable, but it only served to sharpen her alertness. Worse, when she tried to pull the sword free it refused to move. By the time she gave up fighting with it, the blood had risen to her waist. It defied sense, but it was happening. Struggling, she tried to rise to her feet. The shuttle shook, knocking her down. Red liquid splashed everywhere as she tried to get out of it. She thrashed around, vain attempts to right herself again, and only sank further into the blood and disappeared into it.

Kriemhild Gretchen released the shuttle, sensing that it had worked. She watched the tiny ship float in void for a moment, and then it burst like a balloon. As if hatched from an egg, Oktavia von Seckendorff stretched herself out. She floated in the vastness of space, looking about her. The colossal form of Kriemhild Gretchen was strangely still, watching her calmly.

Then the voice came.

"_I am here._"

Oktavia looked to the supermassive Witch in front of her. The voice was in her head, but she knew instinctively that she could respond the same way. "_I can hear you._"

"_Do you remember your name?_"

Oktavia found this an odd question to ask. Of course she remembered her name. It was... it was... "_There's so much haze. I don't know. I can't..._"

"_Sayaka._"

Oktavia stopped. "_What... did you say?_" She thought about the name. It felt right, like it had great meaning to her. It was perfect, and though she didn't understand why, she felt like she should accept the name. "_Sayaka... yes._"

Kriemhild Gretchen began to move, swirling black mass reaching out to Oktavia and wrapping around her. "_We are going to the blue planet. There are others there I wish to free._"

Oktavia gave in, letting herself be carried by the supermassive Witch across the black divide between Earth and the shattered remains of Venus.

* * *

Nagisa Momoe watched the sky. The clouds were dark and foreboding, swirling around at the tops of skyscrapers ominously. Rain pelted her face as her white hair whipped around her in the wind. She had a feeling, like something was coming and she didn't want to miss its arrival. It was something she had to see. That's why she was standing in her backyard in hurricane force winds and driving rains in her pajamas at five in the morning on a Saturday.

A small voice called to her through the storm. "What's going on?"

Nagisa glanced behind her. "Mami... go back inside, dear. You should be sleeping."

The little girl, Mami Momoe, rubbed sleep out of her eyes. "So should you."

Nagisa frowned. "It's not safe out here. You should be inside."

"Mom, if it's not safe for me, it's not safe for you."

Nagisa hissed at her daughter. "Get back inside!"

The child's face froze in fright. Nagisa followed her terrified gaze and gasped. Reaching through the clouds, dark tendrils wrapped around the tops of the buildings and snaked their way down. The black shadow emerged from the thick grey cover, blocking out the rain as it spread out. A single column of darkness shot down to the Earth in the distance, sending up smoke and dust. Another, crashing through a tower and shattering the fragile steel frame. More came down, digging into the ground wherever they hit, punching through solid stone, concrete, glass or metal or whatever else they found.

Nagisa shouted at the top of her lungs. "Get back inside!"

Her panic wasn't without reason, as the next pillar streamed directly for her and her child. She didn't have time to do more than turn back to face the oncoming crushing death before it slammed into the center of her yard. The shockwave sent her flying back into the wall of her house, shattered all the windows, and tossed young Mami through the open doorway. Nagisa opened her eyes and looked up at the solid shadows in front of her. It gave her no time to draw any conclusions about it before the whole thing opened up and released a familiar form.

Charlotte Tomoe fell out onto the ground, landing heavily and laying still. She was breathing, but was obviously in rough shape. The long appendage, stretching back up to the monstrous shape in the sky, seemed not to be moving. Nagisa took the opportunity to crawl forward and grab hold of Charlotte, dragging her back towards her house.

Halfway between the house and where she had fallen, Charlotte opened her eyes. "Na... wha..."

Nagisa stopped and held her down, shouting over the storm. "We need to get inside!"

Charlotte pulled herself up. She looked up at the sky. "Wha... what the hell is that?!"

Nagisa pulled her the rest of the way to the house, shoving her through the door. She would have followed, but something wrapped around her waist and hauled her back. Turning her struggling body around, a large mad eye stared at her from the dark pillar. It looked her over as if considering eating her, then suddenly began to bulge. It was as if the pillar was a tube, and something very large was traveling down it and distorting the shape. Nagisa felt she didn't want to see what was about to come out. An armored colossus broke out of the shadows, landing hard on the ground as the tendrils lifted Nagisa higher.

The massive hulk of Oktavia slowly disintegrated until all that remained was the bare form of Sayaka, laying sprawled out on the grass. The cold driving wind made her shiver, causing her to stir. Pushing herself up, she put her hand on her head to keep it from spinning. After a moment, she realized that there was grass under her hand. She was on some planet with grass, which narrowed it down to Earth. She couldn't remember how she had ended up on Earth. She was on a shuttle headed for Venus when...

Sayaka gasped. "Madoka!"

As Sayaka was struggling to stand, several arcs of lightning converged over her. Something in the air, something Sayaka couldn't see, shattered and broke open. A giant worm creature fell out, plummeting to the ground right over Sayaka.

* * *

Wind whipped the twin drills into her face as she recklessly sped through the streets. Kyoko gripped her seat in terror, praying silently that Mami knew what she was doing. The blond fought with the steering wheel, hauling it to one side and then the other in such rapid succession that, for Kyoko, it brought the woman's sanity into question. Making the car skid around a corner and smash through a bus stop was the last straw.

Kyoko didn't let go of her seat, but she loosed her tongue. "Okay, I get it! Whatever I said, I'm sorry! Stop trying to kill me!"

Mami reached down and switched gears. "Hold on! The city is coming down!"

"WHAT?!"

"Get your head down!" Mami shouted over the storm. "Whatever that thing up there is, it's bringing down the city! I have to get to Nagisa before it's too late!"

Kyoko watched, feeling like everything slowed down for a second, as the bottom floor of the glass building next to them flattened with several people visible inside. They disappeared in an instant. She turned away from the world outside the car, ducking down in her seat. "And we're not going to try saving any of these other people?"

"Huh?" Mami looked over to Kyoko, shocked. She didn't have any time for it to register, as in the moment she looked away a black tentacle speared the car.

Mami opened her eyes, feeling blood running down her face. Her head was resting against the steering wheel, and for some reason the collision foam hadn't activated. Her eyes adjusted, and she gasped at the sight of Kyoko crumpled against the dashboard. She reached her arm out to help her friend, only to draw back when she brushed against the black shape passing through the car from the front window to the back. It pulsated with energy, and suddenly many smaller tentacles came off of it. One such tentacle wrapped around her arm and...

Ripped her arm off.

More tentacles ripped Kyoko's door off, hauling her out into the street. Another pair of the vile things pulled Mami through the window of the driver's side door, lifting her into the air. She watched, helpless, as a long, pointed appendage speared Kyoko and set her ablaze. Screaming with all her might, Mami reached out for her friend with her remaining arm, suspended in the air as the tentacles wrapped around her head. The last thing she saw was Kyoko burning, and the last thing she heard was a horse.

* * *

...

"I will..."

"What?" Sayaka stood up, shaking her head. "You will... what? Who are you?"

Madoka stepped out of the darkness. "I heard a voice, Sayaka. A voice calling me to come. I will follow this voice. And I... I want you guys to come with me."

Sayaka shook her head. "You gu- us... who?" She checked around her and was surprised to see Nagisa standing behind her. Mami and Kyoko were on either side of her. All three were just as confused as her.

Madoka continued. "All our perceptions have been heightened to match our increased capabilities. I will launch us through space toward L Abel 275, and through it to the mystery that lies beyond! There the voice will greet us!"

Mami squeezed her arm several times with her hand, making sure it was really there. "How..." She looked up at Madoka. "That would take billions of years, even at light speed."

Madoka spread her arms out wide. "We have the time. We are immortal now!" She grinned, beaming at the four stunned women. "We are beings beyond normal Human comprehension! We thrive where no other life can! Through countless eons we persist! Hold the core of a star, touch the event horizon of a black hole, and even talk with the gods in Valhalla! We can do anything!"

Sayaka blinked. "Immortal?"

Kyoko added, "Valhalla?"

Madoka laughed. "Maybe not in these bodies, but I can launch us through the vast voids of the universe safely in our altered forms!"

Nagisa gasped, causing the others to turn and look behind them. Sayaka nearly jumped out of her skin. Mami swore. A hulking armored form swam past, followed by a trotting horse with a magnificent warrior figure wearing a kimono. The latter figure's head was a bright tongue of flame. Looking further, they saw a large spotted worm wriggling ahead of the armored mermaid. There was also a big frilly creature that seemed out of place.

Madoka gestured to them all in turn. "Candeloro! Ophelia! Charlotte! Oktavia von Seckendorff! And Kriemhild Gretchen!" For the last one, she motioned downward.

They all looked down, reacting in much the same way they had a moment earlier. The surface they were standing on was a wide, flat, black platform made from the very being of the super-massive Witch.

Kyoko held up a finger. "Okay, that's all cool and everything, but I'm still stuck on Valhalla."

Mami shot her a glare. "Leave it."

"Leave it?" Kyoko made a face that clearly said she didn't want to.

Sayaka nodded, reinforcing the argument. "Oh yeah. Leave it right there."

The dark platform suddenly began closing around them. Madoka spoke, her voice filled with awe as a gale-force wind blew across them. "Your transformations are complete, and so we must bid farewell to the world we knew."

Mami shouted over the rushing sound of the wind. "Why are we leaving?"

Madoka's voice reassured them one last time. "For these five to remain here any longer would be to bring death to all that dwell on this planet!"

Everything went dark and silent.

Madoka's voice rang out. "Discovery awaits us."


	4. Waking From Ice

Considering the size of the universe and the vastness of time, it is mathematically impossible that there would not be a perfect replica of each of us somewhere out there, eventually.

* * *

Steam hissed out into the air as the locking pins pulled free. The cryo-pod opened, revealing a young man. Coughing as he stepped out, he wobbled on his feet and grabbed onto a nearby bulkhead. Another pod beside him opened as well, its occupant, a woman, collapsing onto the floor and throwing up on the metal grate. A few minutes passed as they recovered from their cryo-sleep.

Crawling up the side of her pod, the woman managed to push herself into a standing position. She took a few experimental steps before plodding along towards the door. She grabbed a dark green long-sleeved jumpsuit from a rack near the door and slipped her legs into it before turning back to the man, who was still trying to get his balance.

"Hurry up." Her voice was hoarse, and would be for a few hours. "You don't want to be caught with your pants down." She put her arms into the jumpsuit and headed out the door as she zipped it up, then ducked back in to take a look up and down the man's bare form. "Damn..."

Leaving the cryo-pod room, the woman left her jumpsuit unzipped only a few inches and headed immediately for the bridge. Two others had made it there before her and were checking the ship's systems. Without even a word, she stepped to the front view-port and gazed out into space. Stars speckled the blackness all around, except for one particularly interesting area right below her. A planet, swirling with bright pink and green clouds.

Glancing over her shoulder, the woman called to one of the crew. "Nakashima. Why did we stop?"

A middle-aged woman with her hair cut short answered promptly. "The ship's computer says we dropped out of FTL due to slowly building energy readings... unknown form of energy. We should investigate."

The woman shook her head. "Science missions are for science vessels. I chartered this flight. I say where it stops. We were supposed to be headed for Gailawa in the Arbidium galaxy for the Helium clouds. Why the fuck are we here? Where even _is_ here?"

The door opened and three more people, all wearing the same dark green jumpsuits, stepped onto the bridge. Two headed to their work stations, while the man from before joined the woman at the window. He crossed his arms. "So... what's going on?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. That's what we're trying to figure out. This bullshit is gonna fuck up our course and make everything harder." She called back to the crew. "Osakawa. Why are those clouds candy colors?"

A tired-looking man with a clean-shaven head blinked at the screens in front of him for a few moments before answering. "Because... they're candy-flavored. The atmosphere, according to sensors, tastes like strawberries and has high levels of... sugar vapor."

"Sugar vapor... what the fuck?" She turned to the man beside her. "Kyosuke, is he fucking with me?"

"What?" The man chuckled. "I don't think they'd joke around about something like that. Sugar vapor in the atmosphere is a very serious situation."

She sighed. "Damn it all. Akamiya, Ira, somebody give me an answer that isn't retarded, please!"

Kyosuke laughed. "I'm naming it Cake Planet until you come up with something better."

Akamiya, a young woman barely out of her teens with long light brown hair and sea green eyes, leaned forward to look at the readouts in front of her. "Wow... No, that's good. The surface is practically a giant cake. Several kilometers deep of nothing but cake. High temperatures from the core have baked it through, so we are really looking at a Cake Planet. We gotta record this. It's unprecedented."

"Is the air breathable?" A tall man with dark skin walked onto the bridge, tailed by a short blond woman. She wasn't really short, just looked like it next to him. The man stroked his large beard as he observed the planet below. "Well, I'll be. Pretty, ain't it, Miss Shizuki?"

Kyosuke looked back at the tall man. "I told you before, Captain. She's my wife, so you'll call her by her real name."

Sitting down in the chair at the center of the bridge, the man huffed. "Doesn't say Kamijou on the contract. It says Shizuki Company, which means Shizuki is in charge of the mission, and if there's no Shizuki, then I'm in charge because it's my ship and I'm the captain. Ya dig?"

Osakawa spoke up, still trying to shake off his sleep. "I say we go down there and dig. It's all made of cake."

The woman, Kyosuke Kamijou's wife, known professionally as Miss Shizuki, spun on her heel. "Captain Douglas, perform all the necessary scans on this rock and bring me a report. I will decide if it is worth staying longer. If not, then we shall continue on our way without a moment's delay. We have a job to do, and it isn't here."

The captain saluted casually. "Will do. Feel free to head on down to the mess. Hash and Brown are down there getting something ready for us to eat, and I'm sure they would let our benefactor sneak a few bites."

Heading off the bridge, she turned and pointed at Kyosuke. "Stay here. Make sure they don't leave anything out of the report. I want it full."

With a hearty laugh, the captain called Kyosuke over to him. "I thought she wanted out of here fast. Why's she asking to read a full, unabridged report on a planet survey?"

Kyosuke shrugged. "IQ 186. And she reads really fast. If we do find something cool, she'll be all over it."

* * *

Hitomi Kamijou, head of the Shizuki family name, sat alone at a table in the mess hall. There had been nobody around when she arrived, and she had quickly discovered the Hash and Brown she had been told about were, in fact, a joke. There was a machine in the middle of the room, and it was heating up some hash browns. She hadn't tasted the particular preparation before. Although it was surprisingly tasty for something with an ingredients list limited to only potatoes, she found herself in a foul mood. Her mind was preoccupied with the unnecessary stop and how much it might cost her.

Finishing off her third hash brown, she looked down at herself. Her body was covered in the dark green jumpsuit that contrasted with the bright soothing blue of the lighting and the dull middle grey of the bulkheads. She found her mind straying from time and money wasting and over to thoughts of time already passed. How long, she wondered, had they been traveling already? How old was she, technically?

She didn't have long to wait. Captain Tyrone Douglas waltzed into the mess, a cigar clamped in his mouth and his hand on a medium-sized datapad. He stopped across from her, putting one hand on his hip and holding out the datapad with the other. "Found out everything she's got hiding under that pretty dress. The old girl's got a few neat surprises too. You can read the whole thing if you like, but I'll just give you the highlights."

Hitomi accepted the datapad, beginning to read its contents while munching on a fourth hash brown. "Tell me." She could read and listen at the same time.

He sighed loudly, reaching up and straightening his mustache with his now-freed hand. "We're right on course, so anyone missing us would find the ship eventually. About forty-five percent of the way to Maykro, Arbidium's port world. Meaning we're twenty-seven years into our trip. Your company should have the Helium mining equipment almost set up by now and your favorite pop star back home is most likely a wrinkly old bag. The particular spot we're in, according to Nakashima, is a rogue globular cluster about three hundred thousand lightyears away from any charted thing with more mass than a tuba. The globular cluster itself _is_ charted, but only in that we know it's here and somebody's already attached their name to it. Some douche named Marlon. Too bad, though. I was looking forward to 'the Tyrone Cluster'."

Hitomi reached down for a fifth hash brown. "Amusing. And the planet?"

Douglas just chuckled. "Ah, yes... atmosphere is breathable, but has high concentration of pure fructose molecules. It's a sugar planet. One for the books. Really weird shit going on near the surface, stuff I ain't gonna bother remembering, and it results in a thick crust, if you can call it that, of nearly edible material almost identical to your grandma's chocolate cake. A little too high of a concentration of toxic chemicals means it's still a bad idea to stuff your face with the dirt. Nearly no heavy metals except in the core. That's why we noticed enigma number one."

Hitomi looked up. "Enigma?" Really, she was more interested in the implications of 'number one'.

He grinned. "A tiny little deposit of Gold, literally just sitting out in the open on the surface. Less than one or two grams. We'll be down to check it out shortly, and then it's on to enigma number two."

She realized he was going to make her ask. "And what's that?"

Straightening his posture, he cleared his throat. Suddenly, he had taken on a purely formal tone. Business. "It appears a large object of some sort impacted the planet surface, creating a crater over one hundred kilometers in diameter. We estimate the impact to be approximately nine billion years old. The object is still there and appears to have some vague structure to it. It's either alive or artificial. I'm betting on artificial, because it's not giving off any of the normal signs living things do."

Hitomi set the datapad down. "Well, fuck. I suppose we go down there then. Remind me, Captain, what our crew is."

"Hmm..." He seemed slightly caught off guard by the change in subject. "You and your husband are the passengers... Well, there's me, Nakashima, Osakawa, Ira, Akamiya, Akihara, and the boys down in the engine room. That would be Fukawa, Kagima, Tamahoshi, and my brother Rory. Yeah... yup. That about covers it. We have a hamster, too."

She kept her face impassive. "No Hash or Brown, then."

"Err... no, ma'am."

"Hmm. Let's try to keep things truthful around here." Standing up, she made to start walking away when he called her back.

"Ma'am? There is one other matter."

Hitomi turned back to face him. "You can't stop my husband from playing his violin, so don't even ask."

He shook his head. "Wouldn't dream of it, ma'am. No, it's about enigma three. There are five life-signs on the planet, and only five. They're a few klicks from our selected landing site, in the direction away from the impact crater. We'll be taking the rover, so we can cover the whole area relatively fast, but seeing as it's isolated life the way it is I thought it would be best if you, as mission commander, made the call. We can't lock what species they are, so there is a small risk of hostility."

Letting out a long sigh, Hitomi gave in. "We'll check it out first. That crash hasn't moved in nine billion years. It won't get up and leave in the day or so it takes us to get there."


	5. Sixteen Billion Years

Mami opened her eyes.

That was it. That was all she could do. Her entire body was so sore that she didn't dare move anything. If she felt this bad, she didn't want to know what she currently looked like. She decided it was better to focus herself on something else until her body felt better. She would have tried to get some sleep, but she was certain she'd just woken up. It wouldn't have been possible anyway, with a bright blue light shining in her face.

She tried to think back to what had just happened. No luck, though, as all that came to mind was Madoka. What that thought meant was hard to tell. More of her senses returned slowly, causing her to realize they had all been numbed up until then, and also causing her to notice a few peculiarities about her surroundings. It smelled like someone nearby had been baking cake and throwing fruit everywhere. There was also a distinct taste of candy, and the very air felt charged with sugar-induced energy.

A low gurgling sound, like a growling stomach, echoed around her. The sound was much larger than a Human, and her mind starting immediately thinking through various large animals it could be. She didn't like the results, which seemed to stick on dinosaurs and whales. What she saw pass by her line of sight only a few moments later was far worse than either.

It was long, like a giant bulbous snake moving through the air over her head. It had a large maw filled with razor sharp teeth, along with a pointy nose ending in a red tuft and two long feathery wings sticking off the side of its head. The body was black and speckled in red dots, while the face was white with two yellow patches on its cheeks and wild, crazy, multicolored eyes. The incredible visage sparked a flash of a memory.

Mami sat up with a start, shocks of pain running through her stiff body but being largely ignored. Remembering the creature she had just seen, she turned around to see where it had gone. She just caught the tail end as it wound its way around the side of a mountain. Looking to the ground around her, Mami nearly cried out in shock at the sight of two still forms laying on the ground near her. Stifling herself, not wanting to draw the clearly predatory beast back her way, she forced herself onto her hands and knees in order to crawl over to the nearest form.

Sayaka's familiar face was calm and quiet, but to Mami's great relief her friend was breathing shallowly. She shook Sayaka for a few seconds before moving on to the second form. The pink hair immediately identified her as Madoka. Mami shook her as well, hoping she could wake someone up. She didn't want to be alone with such a crazy-looking creature wandering about.

"Yo! Someone else woke up! Nagisa!"

Mami whirled at the sound of the voice. Kyoko stood several meters away, holding what looked to Mami like a big clump of chocolate cake dripping in chocolate glaze. By the state of her face, Mami judged that Kyoko had found a lot of food and taken part in it less sparingly than usual. It did some good for Mami's nerves to see someone she knew and trusted up and about, though. The mention of Nagisa gave her even more hope.

That hope vanished when the snake-creature appeared behind Kyoko. It gurgled as it drew nearer, brushing against the ground and right past Kyoko. It kept coming, freezing Mami in place with fear until they were face to face. Then it opened its mouth and...

Nagisa's voice echoed in Mami's mind. "I'm glad to see you're finally awake. I thought it would take much longer."

Mami couldn't move, awed, terrified, and sincerely dumbfounded. This monster was Nagisa. Cute, adorable little Nagisa. She'd grown up so fast.

Nagisa continued. "Kyoko woke up earlier this morning, and she's been stuffing her face ever since. After how long I waited before she woke up, I thought I would have to wait at least that long before anyone else woke up as well. But now you're awake, and that means Madoka and Sayaka will be awake soon too."

Mami finally managed to overcome all the strange feelings that were keeping her from moving. She remained bolted in place, but got out a few words. "How... long were you... waiting... alone?"

Kyoko chuckled. "Yeah, this will be the reaction of the century. Wish I had a camera."

Nagisa's massive face made itself into a frown. "The planet was all lava and smoke when I woke up. It changed over time. I think... I think it changed because of me."

Mami hadn't really taken in her surroundings yet. She glanced around, but things weren't really registering on her mind. Everything was still a bit fuzzy. "What did you change? How long have I- how long have we been asleep?"

Nagisa made a face that Mami knew meant she was embarrassed that she had been overthinking it. "I can't tell how long the days here are, because it's not our planet or our sun. The sun is blue, so we're somewhere out in space. But assuming the day and night cycle is the same length as on Earth, you were all asleep for... five thousand eight hundred and nineteen billion days."

Mami was speechless. She had to have heard wrong.

Nagisa tried to make light of it by smiling. "I didn't want to sound annoying by saying the exact number, so I rounded to the nearest billion."

Kyoko sighed. "Yeah... she says she counted. Nothing better to do around here. But that's the long and the short of it. We've been sleeping, with Bebe as our guardian protector, for billions of years. I wasn't able to do the math, but I'm pretty sure that's billions of years. I'm right, right?"

Mami slowly sat herself down, afraid she'd keel over. "Y-yeah... that's right. About... um... more than ten billion. I... I don't know..." And then she started to cry. 'My God... what happened to us? That long, it's... unthinkable. My... my... my b... sh-sh-sh..."

Kyoko dropped her blob of cake and rushed to Mami's side. "Are you okay? Mami, what's wrong?"

Mami had broken down near completely, crying into her hands. "My baby... Charlotte... she's gone. She's gone. My little girl is gone."

Nagisa's voice was calm and comforting, though it did little good for Mami. "We're not. We're still here with you, Mami. We're not gone."

"She's right, you know. The universe is infinite, and we shall traverse the entire great expanse. But we shall always be together." The three of them looked up to see Madoka had awoken. She smiled gently. "And in infinity, familiarity will always be found somewhere."

Kyoko jumped up. "Hey! Now we just have to wait for Sayaka! Oh, uh..." She reached down and grabbed a hand full of the ground, offering it to Madoka. "Hungry? It tastes like chocolate cake."

Madoka's entire outward appearance changed and she blocked the sight of it with her hands. "Oh, no! That's gross, Kyoko! It's dirt!"

Kyoko was incredulous. "No it's not! It's chocolate cake!"

Nagisa interrupted. "I told you. Just cause it tastes like chocolate cake doesn't mean it is chocolate cake."

Sayaka's voice stopped them all. "Damn it all, can you guys keep it down? I'm trying to sleep."

Dropping the dirt cake, Kyoko rushed over and sat on top of Sayaka. "You've slept ten billion years. It's time to wake up."

Sayaka's eyes shot open. "Ten billi- fucking what?!" She shot up, quickly taking stock of her surroundings. "There's no way I... I'd never sleep in that long! What's going on? Why..." She took a good long look at the others, then dropped her gaze to herself. "You guys... it's been a while, so... I think our clothes disintegrated."

Turning bright red, like she hadn't noticed before, Madoka quickly covered herself. Nagisa nudged Mami to try and get her to move, but the fact that she remained curled up into herself told that she'd also noticed. Kyoko didn't seem to mind. Sayaka sighed and stood up, quickly covering herself as well. She looked around a bit more.

"I heard Nagisa... where is she?"

The giant beast opened its mouth, but the voice was in their heads. "I'm right here."

Sayaka jumped back. "Woah, geez! The hell happened!? Madoka, what's going o-" Memories hit her like a tidal wave. "Madoka!" Forgetting herself, she stormed over to her friend and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her. "What have you done!? What did you do to Nagisa?! Why are we all naked!? Why does everything smell like strawberries?!" She paused for a second, staring in shock at something behind Madoka before shouting one last question. "And why the fuck is Kyoko eating the world!?"

Nagisa's focus shifted suddenly, alerting all of them in an instant. "I hear something... nothing lives on this planet but us and... no, it's different."

Sayaka and Madoka stopped their struggle. Mami looked up. Kyoko nearly dropped her food. Four voices spoke in unison. "Nothing but us and what?"

* * *

Captain Tyrone Douglas peered through his binoculars. He liked what he saw very much. He also didn't like what he didn't see. Regardless, he allowed himself a smug grin. "They're Human, from the looks of it. Women, and four of 'em. Not old ladies, but they're certainly not underage. My expert analysis is thirties, but handled aging well. Blonde twin-drills on one. Another has blue hair. The other two... maybe pink and red hair, it looks like."

A voice called him over the radio. "What color are their eyes?"

The Captain made a face. "Now how am I supposed to know that?" He shook his head. "Alright, Miss Shizuki. You wanna have a look?"

Hitomi appeared beside him on the ridge. "Give them here."

Handing the binoculars over, the Captain turned to the rest of the party. "Osakawa, Akihara, have you found that gold yet?"

All the members of the away team were wearing breather masks, obscuring their faces, but the clean-shaven head and short blonde hair gave the two away. The were scouring the ground for the trace amounts of gold the scanners had picked up. Akihara looked up at him. "We've got the location down to within a few meters. I don't think it's under the surface either."

Hitomi's gasp drew the Captain's attention away. "See anything that you like, Miss?"

Osakawa called over, reaching down and picking something tiny up off the ground. "I found something!" He held it up, wiping it off with his finger. "It... it's a locket."

Hitomi shoved the binoculars into the Captain's hands and stormed over to Osakawa. "Give it here."

"Wha...?"

"I said give it here!"

He reluctantly handed it over. "O-okay then."

Hitomi opened the locket, seeing what was inside. "No... this is all wrong."

It was a small photo, showing three young teenage girls wearing the same school uniform. A short, pink-haired girl with red ribbons. A grinning blunette with a yellow hair clip. And a serene girl with green hair.

"How can this be here? How can... _they_ be here?"

* * *

"**_Wake up now. You have visitors._**"

Saldor's voice reached deep into the massive, ancient ship. Something stirred, raising its head. Coiling around itself, it hissed at the thought of intruders. Such welcome intruders indeed.


	6. So Far Beyond

The Captain climbed onto the side of the rover, calling in to the unmasked woman inside. "Akamiya, you picking anything interesting up?"

Akamiya nodded. "Yes, sir. Four of the life forms are grouped together ahead of us. I can't get a good lock on species, but that might be just atmospheric interference. Also, the fifth one isn't far off, but it's a hell of a lot bigger. Sensors show it around sixty feet long, and the shape makes it look like a whale or a worm of some kind. It's on the other side of that mountain for now, but we should book it if the thing starts heading our way."

Douglas grimaced. "Okay. Let's not try to piss it off regardless." He turned back to the rest. "Okay, we're gonna see about picking up some chicks." The only other man in the party looked to the two women on either side of him. He seemed to think better of acting enthusiastic about the order. Douglas decided to rephrase his statement. "Miss Shizuki, do you mind taking Akamiya in the rover to get those ladies, maybe get some clothes for them? I'll leave Fukawa and Akihara here to keep an eye from a distance. See if you can get them back to the ship. Me and Osakawa will start walking to that other big thing. Radio us when you get back."

Hitomi nodded. "That's better." She walked over to the rover and jumped up onto it, hanging on just beside the window canopy. "Let's go. You got extra clothes in there with you, Akamiya?"

The reply was uncertain. "Uhh... yeah, but only two changes of clothes. What exactly are we heading for here?"

Hitomi grinned. "Humans. Women. Naked. Let's go."

"A-and there's four of them?"

"Yes." Hitomi nodded, almost as if she didn't see the problem. "Four of them. Will they not fit in the rover?"

Akamiya shook her head. "Oh, no ma'am. They'll fit, but..."

Hitomi was nonplussed. "Why do you think the men are taking a walk? Let's go already."

Shaking off whatever nervousness she had, Akamiya complied quietly. Hitomi still latched onto the side, the rover rolled forward over the awkward terrain.

* * *

Sayaka sat uncomfortably naked on what she had initially presumed to be a rock, but had later found to in fact be some sort of hard candy. Madoka sat nearby on the chocolate cake ground while Kyoko managed to still be eating. Mami had been coaxed into finding a better position than curled up in the middle of the clearing they had all awoken in.

Madoka was explaining what had happened to them all. "I put us all in our altered forms for the travel because in that state we have much different minds built with an incredibly dense structure for information storing. Our Human minds are technically dormant while these other forms, which are still essentially us, are encapsulated in the cocoon-like pods. When we landed here, they faded and our Human bodies would have remained exposed if I hadn't set it up that Nagisa would remain in her other form. A Human mind cannot store billions of years of information, regardless how repetitive it might be, but this... this Witch form has that capability. So when Nagisa transforms back to her Human form she won't remember this place."

Speaking with her mouth full, Kyoko began further inquiry. "So you had Nagisa guard the rest of us like that for, what was it, like sixteen billion years?"

Madoka nodded. "It was necessary. Otherwise we'd be vulnerable. The different Witch forms will, over that long a period of time, obviously alter the environment to more suit them. Nagisa's Witch form makes sweets. Most notably cake and cheese."

Sayaka interrupted, redirecting the subject. "So, my questions. First, why did we leave Earth to begin with?"

Madoka blinked. "That's, uh... I don't really know. I heard something calling me, and I couldn't ignore it. I had to go. See, Gretchen agrees that there must have been some past life or something of the sort where I became her, you became Oktavia, Kyoko became Ophelia, Mami became Candeloro, and Nagisa became... well... anyway, we don't remember this life, and neither do the Witches. The Witches, by the way, were always part of us, as there are similar beings in every living thing, I believe, but are almost always dormant or otherwise repressed. So something that does remember this past life, or alternate life, called me. It awoke Gretchen and she was simply too powerful. The planet was breaking apart from her power. Venus was obliterated. The same would have happened to Earth if I had stayed."

Sayaka nodded. "Okay, good choice leaving. Why'd you bring us?"

Sighing, Madoka looked away. "I felt you could help me, and you had the Witch forms... I made a snap decision. And it's a long journey. I needed the company."

"Fair enough. Now, how far have we traveled, and why did we stop here?"

Madoka glanced back to Sayaka, surprised. "Why did we... would you rather stop in the middle of space? No, I was powering the flight with my own energy, Sayaka. That isn't limitless. It's simple. I ran out of power and needed to rest. This planet was as good as any, and wasn't in danger of being destroyed. The sixteen billion years was how much time I needed to recuperate, and you were all asleep so you wouldn't be stuck wandering around this place for that long. I timed it all down to the hour, as far as power concerns go. In about forty-five minutes, we can be on our way."

Kyoko, who had otherwise disappeared from the conversation, poked her head out of the ground between them. "Hey, so, why do we have to wait another forty-five minutes?"

Madoka smiled. "What fun is a journey without some rest time to talk and look around?"

Sayaka snapped her fingers to get Madoka's attention back. "So how far did we travel so far?"

The pink-haired woman shrugged idly. "Well, like I said, I can't keep it up forever. We were going at light speed, because you just can't go faster, and we were going for... well, a hundred billion years."

That number hit them all like a bomb.

Kyoko retreated back into her hole. "So that means..."

Mami finally spoke. "That means we're farther away from Earth than the diameter of the known universe."

Sayaka shook her head. "Wait, wouldn't that mean we've pretty much gone into another universe or something like that?"

Madoka jumped up, quickly pointing an accusing finger at Sayaka. "You never listened to those lectures I recorded for you! If you had, you'd know that it does not work like that! Kyoko! Explain this simple concept to Sayaka!"

Kyoko popped back up and turned to look at Sayaka from her hole, while Madoka turned away and waited for whenever an apology would be coming. Kyoko sighed. "It's like this, Sayaka. The universe is infinite. There's only so much we can see, but it goes on forever in every direction. Now, whether or not there is matter occupying space forever in every direction is a different... matter. Obviously, as we've discovered, matter is present quite a ways away. There are other universes, but contrary to popular method of conveying that message through picture, universes are not some bubble-like structure with a barrier edge you can reach simply by going in one direction for a long time, with some space between exiting one and entering another. There is no space between universes. They are separated on a different level that is only partially comprehensible to Human beings."

Sayaka put her foot on Kyoko's head and pushed her down into the hole. "I'm not taking a lecture from a Diglett." She turned to Madoka. "Sorry. I did watch them, but I'm not very good at keeping that kind of thing sorted out. So... why are we going so far?"

Madoka turned back to her friend. "Easy. We need to get out of this universe."

Sayaka made a face. "Then wouldn't we need to go, like, through a portal or something? I thought you said we can't get out of the universe by going in one direction."

"Well..." Madoka shrugged. "The Human race doesn't have the technology to travel between universes. In fact, that's a long ways away. And like I said, we couldn't stay there for long. So if the universe is infinite, which it is, then everything we can imagine is somewhere within its confines. Meaning somewhere, someone has found a way to travel to another universe. Our objective is to search until we find it. If we keep going, we'll find it eventually."

Sayaka stared blankly at her friend for several moments before shaking her head violently. "There's something critically flawed in that plan, I just know it."

Kyoko hauled herself out of her hole, quickly taking refuge behind a chocolaty rock. "I hear a car, guys."

Dropping their discussion, Madoka and Sayaka ducked behind the rock as well. Mami had already been tucked away somewhere safe. Now, over a soft and spongy ridge, something akin to a rover like one would expect to find on a mining asteroid or a moon rolled into view and stopped. Its big wheels and strong suspension allowed it to easily maneuver the soft ground, and now gripped the ridge at odd angles. Through a bulbous front window, they could see a woman driving it. For everything they could see, she was perfectly Human. Madoka peered out from behind the rock, curious to see who had found them. A woman, roughly their own age, stepped up beside the rover. She removed the mask covering her face and called down to them.

"Madoka! Sayaka! Is that you?"

The two whose names had been called looked at each other in shock and chorused together. "Hitomi?"

Kyoko groaned. "Great."

Sayaka shot a glare at Kyoko, then quietly stood up and stepped out. "Hitomi, is that you?"

Hitomi smiled and began trotting down the slope to meet her friend. "How the hell did you guys get here?"

Sayaka shrugged. "Madoka wanted to travel. We brought Kyoko and Mami along for the ride." Hitomi stopped in front of Sayaka, unable to see those hiding behind the rock. Sayaka observed that her friend had something tucked under her arm. "Is that for us? You shouldn't have."

Hitomi held out the bundle of clothes. "Only two sets of clothes, unfortunately. Weren't expecting you to be naked, let alone familiar."

Sayaka accepted the gift, separating the sets and handing one down to Madoka. She reserved the second one. "I think Mami needs this more than I do."

From out of sight, Kyoko interrupted them. "So, uh, yeah. What am I supposed to do? Prance around like I'm at a naturist resort?"

"Shut up, Kyoko." Sayaka put her hands on her hips. "So, Hitomi. How'd you know it was us?"

Hitomi held out her hand, letting the locket hang from its chain. "Our ship picked up traces of gold that led us to this. There's only one other place on this planet's surface with metal, so it couldn't be natural. The picture inside the locket is one I remember taking with you two."

Stepping out from her hiding place, Madoka punctuated dressing herself by zipping up the front of the jumpsuit. She held out her hand for the locket, which Hitomi handed her carefully. Madoka opened it and inspected the image. "It's so... old. But it's just a photograph. The picture is printed on paper. There's no way it could have survived"

Akamiya knocked on the window, drawing Hitomi's attention. She gave a few hand signs, telling her to put on her radio. Once Hitomi had the radio in place, she gave the worker a thumbs up. "What do you got?"

Akamiya's voice was frantic in her ear. "Message from the Captain. Patching him through right now."

Douglas' voice came over the radio. He sounded spooked. "_We got here a lot faster than we expected. It's definitely a ship, and we're inside now. Unfortunately, I think we need to be leaving quickly. We got in through a door that was open when we arrived. No such opening was picked up by the scanners. There were also fresh tracks leading away. Something was inside, locked in tight, and left between the time we landed and the time we finished our stroll here. What's more, there are... really gross remains. Several years old. Between twenty and thirty years. Two bodies, highly decomposed, wearing standard science expedition uniforms and carrying emergency survival gear. This place entombed them, which is why they're not dry bones yet, but there is... missing pieces. Ma'am, these bodies have been eaten._"


	7. Pandora's Box

"Get done quickly. The atmosphere isn't toxic, but if you inhale too much sugar air you will definitely die." Ira called down the ramp at Kagima and Tamahoshi as they scurried about outside the ship. The two mechanics were trying to locate the source of a problem they found with the ramp. It wouldn't close, and that meant they couldn't leave the planet. Ira didn't like that.

Outside, Kagima called Tamahoshi over to something he'd found. "Yeah, this is probably it. This piston is all gummed up. Some slimy shit. Gonna need something pretty strong to remove this."

Tamahoshi reached in and stuck his gloved fingers into the strange substance covering the piston. "This is too small, don't you think? If it were some mechanical issue it would have gotten all over some other stuff. Environmental hazard would be even more widespread. This is..." The slime stuck to his glove as he pulled away, stretching and clinging to the metal. He decided not to smell it.

Kagima ran around to the front of the ramp and called up. "Ira! We're gonna need some good cleaner to get this shit off. It's just a minor problem, but it's really sticky." He waited for several seconds with no reply before calling up again. "Hey! We're gonna be trapped on this cake hole if we don't clean this up! Get Rory down here!"

* * *

Captain Douglas looked out the hole in the side of the crashed enigma. It was a ship. That much he was certain of. Ancient and massive, but its purpose eluded him. The presence of Human remains confused him even more. The whole thing spooked him, so he preferred to get out of dodge as quickly as he could. He turned and looked back into the dark ship. "Osakawa! You takin' a whiz or something?"

There was no response.

"Yo! What are you doing? I want to head back to the ship now! You can't just stay here!" Nothing. "Osakawa?"

He heard a sound, something small moving low along the ground. It wasn't Osakawa.

* * *

Mami looked down at herself, only half pleased with having clothes. The shirt was too tight for her. Akamiya had found a pair of blankets that Kyoko and Sayaka were using to keep covered. They had loaded into the back of the rover, a tight fit, and were headed back to a ship that Hitomi had brought with her. It seemed to Mami to be a little too convenient, but convenience was something she had learned to accept. The rover was quiet. Hitomi was driving, with three others walking along outside. Madoka sat crammed in beside Hitomi, staring endlessly at the locket she'd been given. Sayaka and Kyoko were both just waiting for someone else to speak.

Hitomi finally broke the silence, reaching forward and tapping a panel on the control console. "Captain, are you trying to contact me?" She frowned when no response came. "Fucking useless machine. I swear, it has intelligence and it just does it for shits and giggles."

Madoka let out a long breath, then looked up at the others. She then looked up to Hitomi. "This isn't mine."

Hitomi blinked, confused. "What? What, the locket?"

Madoka nodded. "My locket couldn't have possibly survived this well for this long. It looks old, aged, but not old enough."

Hitomi smiled. "Ah, don't worry. I got it figured out. Your ship probably crash-landed softly, and oxymoron, I know, but it was soft enough that the cryo-sleep systems kept working. You've been asleep since you left, which by this point is almost fifty years. You wouldn't have taken that into the pod with you, so-"

Sayaka cut her off. "That's not how we got here."

Hitomi glanced back at her. "I'm sorry? What do you mean?"

Madoka held the locket up for Hitomi to see. "This belonged to the Madoka you remember. But I couldn't be her just as much as you couldn't be the Hitomi I remember. You said we got here in a ship, and that it probably crashed. If that's the case, then whatever you used to determine there was only one other source of metal on the planet's surface should have picked it up. But what you picked up wasn't any ship we came in."

Hitomi took a deep breath, thinking it over. The only other metal on the planet was not their ship. It was some ancient crash billions of years old. "Then... then how did the locket get here?"

Mami jumped up. "A mystery!"

Sayaka grabbed her arm and pulled her down. "Out of your league."

Madoka laughed. "No, let her try."

Looking around, Hitomi got the feeling that there was something she was missing. "What's going on."

Mami cleared her throat, standing again. She wobbled a bit, but braced herself against the sides of the rover. "I know how to solve mysteries. I'm a private eye!"

Hitomi shook her head. "The hell you are."

"I'm serious." Mami straightened up as much as she could in the cramped rover. "Okay, let me do this. The first thing we need to do is take a step back. Most mysteries that seem hard to solve are only so because the view you get of them is too narrow. Taking a step back allows you to see a few things. So... the question is how this locket got here. First, there are some things Hitomi needs to understand. We are not the people you remember, nor are we truly anyone you ever knew. We left Earth, if my math is correct, over one hundred and sixteen billion years ago. We were in a form of stasis, I guess you could say, until only a matter of minutes ago."

Madoka looked over to Hitomi, explaining with a bit more detail. "We were in, uh... well, we didn't have a ship. We were in a biologically crafted mobile stasis field, travelling at light speed for around a hundred billion years. We landed here and remained in stasis for another sixteen billion."

Mami continued. "You should be familiar with the theory that the universe is infinite, therefore considering the amount of matter in the universe it is unlikely that there isn't an exact copy of each of us somewhere out there. Adding in the endless expanse of time, it becomes a certainty that there are multiples of you that have existed and will someday exist. Now with that in mind, it is still an extreme coincidence that an exact replica of someone we know, who also knew exact replicas of us, is the person to greet us when we wake up. Regardless, it happened. So the answer is that if Madoka did bring her locket with us, it would have long broken down and disintegrated. That cannot be her locket."

Sayaka prodded Mami's leg. "Alright, so how is it here with a picture of Madoka, Hitomi, and me."

Mami smacked Sayaka's finger away from her leg. "That... with a little evidence, can be answered. Hitomi, the Madoka you knew. What happened to her?"

After a long sigh, Hitomi answered. "Madoka... with Sayaka, Kyoko, Mami, and a crew of five others, left twenty years ahead of my ship. They were to arrive ahead of us and start work before we got there. We were supposed to be collecting Helium in the Arbidium galaxy. They'd have been working for twenty years when I arrived, and would have caught up to the twenty years I aged before following them. Unfortunately, their ship went off course. It never got within a million lightyears of the seventy-ninth beacon, and never corrected its course after that. Seventeen years into their journey, they were declared missing."

"Then their ship is here. We just have to find it." They all looked at Mami. She shrugged. "No other way this locket could have gotten here." She smiled knowingly. I propose a theory. Sometime after, I presume, the seventy-eighth beacon, they went far off course. I can only guess what exactly these beacons are, but judging by how you referred to them I think my guess is pretty close. Regardless, they ended up here. Landing briefly, they went to investigate something..."

Hitomi looked like a light went on over her head. "The ship. There's an ancient ship crashed on the surface of this planet. Nine billion years old. It was sealed when we scanned it, but the Captain found it open. ...There were Human remains inside, between twenty and thirty years old. I'm guessing closer to twenty. They'd been eaten by something. Standard science expedition uniforms, like Madoka's team would have been wearing. Two bodies, with emergency survival gear."

Mami nodded. "Because that's when your friends would have been here. The remains may not be your friends. I think they got into that ship, something attacked them. It had probably been in stasis or something similar. It killed two, which we have to assume were two of the other crew members, and sent the rest fleeing back to their ship. In the rush to escape, Madoka dropped her locket. They took off in their ship and fled the planet."

"Or not." Hitomi flicked a switch on the console in front of her. "Nakashima, are you there?"

"_Read you loud and clear. What can I do for you?_"

Hitomi glanced back at Mami, then down to Madoka. "I have a bad feeling about this." She returned to the radio. "Nakashima, can you run a sensor sweep directed towards the planet's high orbit? I'm looking for a ship. Large. Helium miner. The type with a minimal crew. Particularly anything that's just floating there."

After a few moments of silence, Nakashima came back. "_That's odd. It was on the other side of the planet. Just floating there like you said. How'd you know it'd be there?_"

"Fuck!" Hitomi growled as she switched frequencies, calling to the three walking alongside the rover. "Akamiya, Akihara, Fukawa, grab on! We're flooring it!" She waited barely five seconds before changing gear and pushing the rover to its full speed. The bumps and hills were more pronounced at this frantic speed, but Hitomi managed to keep her hands steady as they flew across the console, switching frequencies again. "Captain! Get out of that ship! We're getting off this planet as soon as everyone's aboard!"

Captain Douglas' voice came back instantly. "_I'm with you on that one. I'm on my way back. Osakawa's... well, he's in bad shape._"

Nakashima called in next, having caught on to the desperation of the situation. "_Kagima and Tamahoshi are cleaning a foreign gelatinous substance from some of the ramp's components. We can't take off until they're done, but that should be fixed up before you get back._"

Hitomi grimaced. "Captain, we're gonna swing by and pick you up."

"_Don't bother. I can already see the ship._"

"Well then I intend to beat you inside."

* * *

The ship drifted alone in orbit, cold and silent as a grave. Gravity had shut off. The lights had died. Only its own momentum kept it up. A corpse, old and decayed, floated in the cargo bay, its position totally static. A few meters from it, a stasis pod lay open. Eight other pods lined the walls of the bay, three on the back and on each side. Apart from the one left open, five were empty. The three at the back were occupied, two rotted corpses on the left and right.

The middle pod contained a young woman, her chest slowly rising and falling with each breath. Her face obscured by the creature clinging to it, spindly legs wrapped around her head and long tentacle-like tail wrapped around her throat.


	8. Epimetheus

Everyone had made it back to the ship safely. Osakawa was in the medical bay, having apparently collapsed into unconsciousness. Captain Douglas had brought back with him a story of strange spider-like creatures with long whip-like tails. One had attacked him, and gotten stomped for its trouble. Another, dead and stiff, had been near Osakawa when the Captain had found him. However, he seemed to be fine now.

The ship had blasted its way off of the planet as soon as they could leave, and were now approaching the mystery ship floating in orbit.

Hitomi gazed out the front view port. "I was right. It's the _Epimetheus_. Our sister ship."

Douglas stood beside her, arms folded across his chest. "I don't like this, but we have to go in. Check on them. At least find out what happened."

Hitomi nodded. "You and me will go aboard with Madoka and Mami. I'll go get them. You make sure we're attached properly, then join us at the airlock." She turned and looked across the bridge. "Kyosuke, you're in charge while we're over there."

She quickly left the bridge, heading down to the cargo hold where Madoka and the others were still in the rover. Akamiya had brought some more clothes for Kyoko and Sayaka, so they were considered decent, but she had claimed that it was best for them to remain quarantined in case they had carried any diseases with them. Really, she just didn't want to be there when Sayaka found out she was married to Kyosuke.

Climbing up the side of the rover, she opened the hatch on the top and leaned in. "Alright, quarantine is over. We're docking with the _Epimetheus_. I want Madoka and Mami to come over with us. Sayaka and Kyoko I want on the bridge keeping tabs on us."

Sayaka climbed out first, sliding down the front of the rover and landing hard on the metal grated floor. The others followed, only they climbed down the normal way. Hitomi led them out of the cargo bay and into a long corridor, pointing Sayaka and Kyoko towards the bridge before continuing to lead the other two down the the airlock. There she found that she had to physically put Mami's pressure suit on. Madoka seemed to be able to figure it out on her own, but Mami was clueless. Captain Douglas stood by waiting patiently the whole time.

Sealing her helmet, Madoka turned to Hitomi. "Why do we need these?"

Douglas answered for her. "The ship we're going to has no atmosphere. No oxygen and no gravity, as well as minimal power. The crew could have survived in stasis... well, seven of them, anyway."

Hitomi fastened the belt around Mami's waist. "Okay, hold your hands out at your sides."

Mami did as she was told, blushing. "This is really embarrassing."

Hitomi sighed. "Just stop moving. All you need now is your helmet." Picking up the large clear dome, Hitomi sealed it over Mami's head and went about quickly putting her own suit on. "Everyone, check your radios. Make sure you're hooked up properly."

Douglas went first, simply speaking into his helmet. "This is Black Leader. Do you copy?"

Sayaka's voice came back. "_Black Leader, we copy._"

Kyoko butted in immediately after. "_Black Leader? What kind of name is that?_"

Fitting her helmet on, Hitomi went next. "Green Leader here. Check."

Sayaka, who had probably shoved Kyoko away from the console, responded again. "_We read you, Green Leader._"

Mami looked to Hitomi, her face hopeful. "Yellow Leader?"

Hitomi shook her head and pointed at the Captain. "Black Two."

"Oh..." Mami cleared her throat. "Uh... Black Two?"

"_You only wish you were black, Mami. I told you. You can't rap._"

"_Kyoko, shut up. Go watch the cameras. Black Two, we read you._"

Madoka quickly gave Hitomi a thumbs up. "Green Two here. Do you read me? This is Green Two. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I said, can you hear me? Do you read me? This is Green Two."

"_Someone slap her. Madoka, we fuckin' hear you. Now shut up. Black Team, Green Team, you are go for boarding. Head into the airlock for depressurization._"

The door opened and the four of them moved into the airlock. It sealed behind them, and a slow hiss signaled the depressurization. Once it finished, the door ahead of them opened to reveal a dark hallway. They stepped in, lights on their helmets illuminating the derelict ship.

Hitomi pointed down the corridor to the left. "Madoka and me will head this way and check out the bridge. Captain, you and Mami check the cargo hold. See if anyone's still in the stasis pods."

* * *

Sayaka sat on the bridge of the _Prometheus_, staring at the camera feeds in front of her. Kyoko, beside her, was more focused on fiddling with the headset she was wearing. Sayaka glanced up, looking across the bridge at Kyosuke. He hadn't said a word to her since she arrived on the bridge, instead just standing and staring out the window at the bridge of the ship beside them. Behind them, she knew Akamiya and Nakashima were monitoring their instruments and listening for anything from the team on the _Epimetheus_.

Kyoko finally figured out a way to hold the headset on without being uncomfortable or simply having them fall off her head. She returned attention to the camera feeds, then quickly tapped Sayaka on the shoulder. "Hey, what does that light mean?" She pointed to a red light blinking beneath Mami's feed.

Sayaka squinted at the light, then looked down at the manual in her lap. "That's... I think that means her radio is off."

Kyoko frowned. "Why would her radio be off?"

Sayaka groaned. "She's an idiot. That's why." She grabbed her mic and held it closer to her mouth. "Black Two, do you read me? Mami? Black Leader, Mami's radio is out."

Kyoko reached over and poked another light. A red light under the Captain's feed. "His is out too."

"The hell?" She looked at Madoka and Hitomi's feeds. Their lights were green. "Green Team, be advised we've lost radio contact with Black Team. Check your radios."

"_Green Leader here. Nothing wrong with our radios. We're almost at the bridge. We'll wave._"

Kyoko looked over at Kyosuke. "So that's what he's waiting for."

Sayaka slammed the manual closed and shoved it into Kyoko's arms, leaning onto the console and growling as she buried her head in her arms. "Why the hell would they turn off their radios?"

* * *

Tyrone stopped in front of the wide door to the cargo bay. He had pulled their radios and attached their suits in a way that they could actually speak to each other directly. Mami had protested for only a moment before she realized what he was doing. He turned to face her. "I heard your explanation of what happened over the radio. You explained it pretty well, and I believe you."

Mami gave a slight smile. "Hitomi had the radio on?"

He nodded. "Guess so. Look, when you all left Earth... did you leave a family behind?"

Mami nodded, looking down. It was something she was trying to avoid dwelling on. "My daughter."

He looked surprised. "Daughter? What's her name?"

"Charlotte. We both started using my maiden name after my husband died."

He gave a sad sigh. "I'm sorry. But, Charlotte... I like that name. It's good. So, uh... your husband. What happened to him?"

"Lung cancer, actually." She swallowed hard. "Uh... it hit him out of nowhere. Charlotte was two."

The Captain seemed stricken for a moment, but quickly shook it off. "Ouch. Glad I quit three years ago. Well... thirty, counting years in stasis. Ever since this ship was officially declared missing. I couldn't... My wife was on this ship."

Mami, who had taken a moment to look up at the door in front of them, slowly turned down to look back at him. "...I know."

After a few moments of silence, Tyrone turned back to the door. "Alright, let's get this thing open." He reached over to a control panel on the wall beside the door, tapping in a key code. The door obediently lifted out of the way without much complaint. He grinned. "Everything went better than expected. Maybe she's still alive, you know?"

Mami watched the room before them slowly reveal itself. "I... I think you shouldn't get your hopes up."

A rotted skeletal corpse lay on the floor in the middle of the cargo bay, frozen stiff from exposure to cold space. On the far end, they could see three stasis pods that were closed and cold, the glass frosted over. Two of them were dark.

Tyrone let out a long sigh. "One. This ship is a tomb. There's only one left."

They made their way slowly to the body in the middle of the room and knelt down beside it, rolling it over. Mami wiped years of dust and grime off of the name tag. "...Douglas."

He shook his head. "I guess... I guess I knew. The moment the ship was declared missing, I knew she was gone, but... There's always hope, right? Well... usually... until now. But... well, at least I can still say goodbye. The way I should have."

She smiled. "That's a good idea. But first we should check these pods, right?"

"Yeah..." He stood up, prompting her to do the same. "Let me hook the radios back up first."

* * *

Kyoko pointed at the Captain's feed. "There. Is he fixing it?"

Sayaka sat up straight. "Oh, uh... looks like it." They both turned their eyes to the red light under Mami's feed. Sure enough, it suddenly turned green.

Kyoko pounced on the mic. "AAARGH! IT'S GOT ME! HEEEEEeeeeelllp..."

Sayaka slapped her away. "Sorry about that. Kyoko needs to go get fucked. Mami, do you read?"

"_Hi guys. I would like to apologize for turning off our radios, but we had something to discuss privately._"

Sayaka grimaced. "Right. Well, next time, wait to do it on your own time. You freaked us out."

"_Right. Won't happen again._"

Douglas's voice came next. "_What did we miss?_"

Sayaka glanced over to Kyoko, who subsequently flinched. "Uh... yeah, Green Team made it to the bridge. Hitomi and Kyosuke waved at each other. They found the navigator and radio operator. That was... Arakawa and Momoe."

"_Nagisa? Why didn't Hitomi mention her?_"

Hitomi answered directly. "_I didn't know it was relevant._"

Sayaka continued. "They're searching through the rest of the ship. We can see the pods you have are occupied. Who's in them?"

Kyoko and Sayaka watched carefully as Mami approached one of the dark pods. She reached up and wiped the frost from the glass, revealing a shriveled old corpse.

"_The name tag says... Kyono._"

They turned their attention to Douglas' feed at the other dark pod.

He read the name tag out loud as soon as he could make it out. "_Sakura._"

Kyoko quickly got up and stepped away from the console. Powerless to help, Sayaka watched with concern. "Hey. You okay?"

Kyoko briefly looked back. "I..." She shook her head. "I'll be fine. Just... I'm gonna go get something to eat."

Sayaka watched her go. She wasn't used to being actually concerned for Kyoko. Her friend was normally carefree and happy-go-lucky. She would have to check up on Kyoko later, but right now she knew she had to focus on coordinating the teams. "Alright..." She grabbed the mic. "Who's in the middle one?"

"_Sayaka?_" It was Madoka.

"Give me a second, Madoka. Mami, check the middle pod."

Douglas wiped frost from the middle pod, and the light from inside filled the cargo bay. Inside the pod, illuminated by the backing lights, was a woman in a science expedition uniform. She wasn't anyone Sayaka knew or recognized, but somehow the long black hair seemed strangely familiar.

She mused to herself, looking over the very alive features of the stranger. "Who is..."

Madoka interrupted her train of thought. "_Sayaka, I really think you should see this._"

Impatiently, she chided her friend. "I said just a second."

Hitomi cut in. "_Sayaka, we found Kaname. It's a mess._"

Her attention suddenly drawn away from the stasis pods, Sayaka looked over Hitomi and Madoka's feeds. "What? What do you mean?"

Hitomi turned to a table in the middle of the room they were in. "_We're in the medical bay. Madoka was here when she... well, like I said. It's a mess. Just look at this._" She moved closer, giving Sayaka a good view. A good view she really didn't want. "_The rib cage is obliterated, like something burst out of her chest. It was a painful death, that's for sure._"

Sayaka bowed her head. It hurt just thinking about it. "And that accounts for the entire crew. That means... that means I was the first one to die, down on the planet in that ship."

On the screens in front of her, Madoka turned to face Hitomi so Sayaka could see her. "_So... then who's in the stasis pods?_"

Hitomi explained. "_Kyoko, Tomoya and... Well, wait... where's..._"

Sayaka answered the question Hitomi was having trouble asking. "Black Team found a Douglas on the floor of the cargo bay. I saw the name tag when Mami leaned in to read it."

"_Oh._" Madoka suddenly looked aghast. "_Oh..._"

Captain Douglas finally read off the name tag of the last remaining survivor of the _Epimetheus_. "_It's Akemi. Homura's still alive._"


	9. Resurrection

"Homura Akemi." Hitomi stood beside the door to the medical room. Two small beds were set up, one with the unconscious Osakawa and the other with the rescued Homura. Kyoko, Sayaka, and Madoka stood around the room, paying close attention to Hitomi's words. "We were an inseparable group in high school. Madoka, Sayaka, Homura, Kyoko, and myself. We were the five Musketeers."

Madoka interrupted. "There were only three Musketeers."

Sayaka corrected her. "Well, four if you count D'Artagnan."

Kyoko raised her hand. "Hi, uh, what are Musketeers?"

Sayaka answered confidently. "They were a unit of the royal guard in France for several hundred years."

"So why were there only three?"

Sayaka was speechless, unable to answer that.

Hitomi picked up the slack. "You see, the point is, we were nigh inseparable. Homura was our friend. We grew up together, all of us. I mean... well, if you know me and Nagisa and Kyosuke, frankly I don't see how you wouldn't know Homura. She was always there."

Kyoko shrugged it off. "I never seen her before."

Sayaka nodded. "Same here. She's... oddly familiar, but I guess a distinctive look like that does that."

Madoka let out a long sigh before speaking up. "Actually... I think I remember her. I don't know where from, and I know I never met her. At least in this life."

The others were silent, just blinking at her in confusion. Kyoko raised her hand. "What do you mean 'this life'?" Sayaka shook her head rapidly. Kyoko put her hand down again. "Nevermind."

Hitomi cut back in. "But we just proved that there are multiple of you, didn't we?"

"I don't think that's quite what I mean." Madoka shook her head. "No, the version of me that you knew was just someone generated by random chance in the universe. We were identical in every way, but we were not the same person." She looked over Homura's peaceful form, her chest slowly rising and falling. "Same body, different soul. What I'm talking about is a different body and the same soul. Reincarnation. You understand?"

Hitomi sighed, shaking her head. "See... the Madoka I knew would never have bought into something like that. She loved the mystery and the wonder in the universe around her, and was always thinking of what might be, but she never believed anything until she saw it."

The atmosphere of the room changed, and Madoka quickly straightened herself out. "That was a contradictory statement. She would never have believed anything she didn't see, but she would never have believed this... regardless? I think you misjudge what she would and would not believe. After all, how is it you know I did not see it?"

Hitomi looked cornered. "Madoka, I-"

Cutting her off, Madoka turned away and changed the subject. "This girl, Homura. ...Is she going to wake up soon? Do you think it would be wise for her to see us all? Considering she may have already witnessed us dying, it may be traumatic, or perhaps it would cause her to believe it was all just a dream and she'd never really awoken from stasis until just now. So, do Kyoko, Mami, Sayaka, and myself make ourselves absent for her waking, or do we make ourselves the only ones present?"

"Doesn't matter now." Kyoko observed, as Homura's eyes slowly opened.

They all held their breath as Homura lifted her head, her eyes darting around the room. They finally fixed on Madoka. "You're... alive... Madoka, you're alive!" She jumped out of bed and immediately collapsed to the floor, her legs unable to support her. Homura landed face down at Madoka's feet, slapped the grated floor in anger, then stopped. She looked up from her low vantage point and weakly reached out and grabbed Madoka's leg. "You came back for me..."

Surprising both Madoka and Hitomi, Sayaka reached down and hauled Homura up, supporting her. Homura wobbled for a few moments before turning to look at Sayaka. The blunette smiled. "What are you talking about? We never left you."

Homura reached up and brushed her hand against Sayaka's face. "I saw you... I saw you all die. I thought I was alone."

Sayaka shook her head. "There was a malfunction. We couldn't get you out of your pod until Hitomi's ship got here." Madoka and Hitomi exchanged glances, realizing what Sayaka was doing. Kyoko shifted her weight and leaned back against the wall, still trying to work it out. Sayaka continued. "The malfunction probably caused you to have nightmares. We never died."

Taking a few gasping breaths, still trying to return her breathing to normal after the initial shock, Homura turned her head to look around the room. "You're not... dead?"

Kyoko patted herself down, as if looking for holes. "Don't think I am." She looked up and grinned at Homura. "That's right, kiddo. It was all a dream. I had a dream too. There was a horse. What was in yours?"

Homura shook her head, then seemed to focus on thinking of an answer. "There was... cake. Cake everywhere."

Kyoko stood up straight. "Dear God, the woman's been traumatized. Homu, that sounds awful."

Hitomi sighed. "Well, you're okay now. We're gonna take care of you. We're a little behind schedule, but we can get by without you for now. You need to rest here for a bit."

Homura nodded. "Rest... alright." She blinked a few times, then looked around the room. "Where's Mami?"

* * *

It was different, but still the same somehow. Mami never could have imagined feeling this way again. It was so warm. She took another sip of the coffee.

Tyrone smiled. "It's been too long since I seen that."

Mami blushed. "Seen what?"

He shrugged, then leaned in closer. "That face you make when you just had a good cup. It's exactly the way I remember."

Mami held up the cup. "The ingredients are different, but the way you make it is the same. It has the same flavor of your touch."

He casually reached up and stuffed a hash brown in his mouth. They were sitting in the otherwise empty mess hall, enjoying the quiet and each other's company. Mami was beginning to feel, being here now, that she might not want to continue the journey with Madoka. Her journey, she thought, had ended here. To her, the chains of death had been undone. Here, in the middle of the endless and suffocating void of space, her miracle had happened.

* * *

The heavy thrumming of the engine filled the room. Fukawa leaned back against the control console, breathing heavily. She looked down at her side, the red on her hand, then covered it up again quickly. It hurt bad, but didn't look life-threatening. Either way, she knew she had to get up to the sickbay. She also had to report the damage, which she grumbled to herself about. Tamahoshi was supposed to be on duty now, but he was nowhere to be seen. It was due to his neglect that Fukawa had been present when a pressure valve popped, sending the seal flying and hitting her. It had punctured her side, but near as she could tell there was no serious damage.

Pushing herself up, Fukawa stumbled her way to the door and out of the engine room. It was against her better judgement to leave it without supervision, but she had fixed the problem before tending to herself. That delay may have put her at more risk, so she found it wise to see herself fixed next.

Tamahoshi had never left the engine room. He lay under the floor grates, a bloody and torn mess, a black mass coiling around his corpse and listening to everything in the ship.

* * *

Sayaka and Kyoko walked onto the bridge. Kyosuke turned from looking out the front view port upon hearing them enter. Akamiya and Nakashima were also present, seated at their stations and keeping an eye on the space around the ship. Sayaka made her way over to the communication station, sitting down and picking up a headset. She put it on and started fiddling with the instruments in front of her. Kyoko found the captain's chair and made herself at home there instead.

Kyosuke stepped away from the window, walking over to Sayaka and sitting beside her. He tapped her shoulder, surprising her, and gently pulled the headset away from her ear. "What are you looking for? We're alone out here."

Sayaka sighed. "Just occupying myself, that's all. What's with this dial?" She pointed at a large round thing on the station, unfamiliar numbers marked around it.

He looked it over for a moment before explaining. "Hyper- and sub-sub-frequencies. Sometimes signals can get distorted by a black hole or a supernova, to the point where normal instruments can't pick them up. It's an emergency kind of thing. I don't expect to find anything."

She nodded, taking it in. "Is it directional? Like, do you have to point the antenna to pick something up?"

"Yes, which makes it even less of a thing we can use." He shrugged. "If you want to play with it, go ahead."

As soon as he'd said it, she grabbed the dial and started turning it down. Over her headset, she could hear a constant buzzing getting lower and lower until it just disappeared entirely. She stopped and pulled the headset down around her neck, turning to Kyosuke. "If it picks anything up, it'll adjust it so I can hear, right?"

"Yeah..." Kyosuke narrowed his eyes at her. "Are you looking for something in particular?"

Sayaka shook her head. "No... just exploring. This far out, you never know what you'll find."

"Oh, well, in that case..." He grabbed the dial and turned it down as low as it could go. He grinned. "Maybe we'll hear something if we turn the antenna some."

She waited for him to put his own headset on and start working the antenna's directional controls. She had to lean back when, suddenly, he leaned across in front of her. She felt her face turn red even as the headset crackled to life. It was being close to him again, the boy she had wanted for so long. Hitomi had one here just like she had won at home, on the Earth Sayaka remembered. Among the static, Sayaka realized that she wanted one more chance.

"_Madoka._"

Inside the static of the stars, one word echoed through the void and found its way to Sayaka's ears. _Madoka_. She looked over to Kyosuke, and the look on his face told her he had heard it as well.

"_Madoka!_"

Kyosuke pulled his headset off and flipped a switch on the console. When the voice came again, it echoed through the bridge.

"_Madoka! Stay away!_"

Kyoko sat up. "That voice. It's..."

"_Madoka, that creature is trying to trick you!_"

Sayaka slowly put her headset down. "Creature...? That's Homura's voice. How is it... out there?"

Nakashima called over. "Computer says the signal's origin is coming from... halfway between us and Arbidium."

Kyoko stood up. "Someone show me a picture of the galaxy you came from."

Nakashima looked up in surprise. "What? Um, okay, I got it over here."

Sayaka and Kyosuke watched in confusion as Kyoko rushed over and inspected the galaxy. They exchanged an odd glance before Kyoko cried out in victory.

"It's Abel! L Abel... numbers! We're behind Abel... about six billion lightyears behind Abel! This is the place Madoka was so interested in!"

Kyosuke got up and headed for the door. "Alright, I'll go get Madoka and Hitomi. I should probably tell the Captain to come up here as well." He looked back to Sayaka as he opened the door. "Guess exploring is worth it, eh?"

Something long, black, and spiny speared through Kyosuke's chest. He choked and collapsed.


	10. Aliens

In the cold of space, a small rusty-colored planetoid drifted closer to the warped planet and the two ships orbiting it. As it moved nearer, a strange melody echoed in the void. The free-wandering mass began to sing.

**Wernglshal kluu'thukunn brorvlnkr'shkeknfrawln trrgazdr-**

_**GHROTH.**_

The smaller planetoid stopped emitting sound, and even stopped moving altogether. Then it opened its eye, a massive hideous red eye that glared down at the planet. No feelings of any sort came from the immense being, except for those of feeling the presence before it and feeling the gaze set on it. It knew whose gaze it felt.

**The Servant of the King. You speak to me.**

**_STAY YOUR SONG. SHE WILL AWAKEN IN HER OWN TIME. FOR NOW, I ALLOW HER TO PLAY THAT SHE YET RETAINS HUMANITY. THROUGH THIS, SHE SHALL BE STRIPPED AND RID OF IT, BECOMING THE FEASTING MASS I WANT BEFORE I CRUSH HER._**

**Your word, Servant of the King.**

_**ALL HAIL SALDOR, SERVANT OF THE KING.**_

Ghroth, the Harbinger of awakening of all things ancient and mad, closed his eye.

**All hail the Servant of the King.**

Nearby, on a comparatively small helium-mining ship, Madoka stopped in the hallway and shuddered. "Did you guys feel that?"

Hitomi glanced around momentarily, but didn't stop walking. "Feel what?"

Madoka glanced between Homura, who they were taking to the mess hall, and Hitomi. "I don't know. I just feel like... something is wrong." Seeing that they didn't quite get her meaning, she shook her head. "Never mind. Let's just go meet Mami and get something to eat." She did want to find Mami, but for a different reason. She knew something was wrong, and Mami would understand Madoka's sense of foreboding. And she needed to make sure her friends were all right.

* * *

Sayaka screamed in anguish and rage, immediately charging at the monstrous black creature that came through the door. Over the sound of her own voice, she could barely hear Akamiya and Nakashima screaming. The beast wrenched its ridged prehensile tail from Kyosuke's body and turned to face her, but both were to be disappointed. Kyoko crashed across the room, flying across in front of Sayaka and cutting her off. Kyoko added her own voice to the screams and the creature's vile hisses, a war cry as she practically flew with her momentum, running along the wall and tackling the creature into the wall.

Sayaka had been forced to slow down, but now she had a chance to better approach the situation. She ducked in, grabbing Kyosuke and dragging him away from the melee that was unfolding. Only a few meters away, Kyoko grappled with a monster easily two feet taller than her, and it looked like it was hunched over. Its claws wrapped around her arms and began to dig in, tearing the sleeve and drawing blood. Its tail whipped around her, lashing at her back and leaving only shreds of her shirt behind. Through it all, she held the creature against the wall.

"Sayaka! Get down!"

Acting on instinct, Sayaka threw herself over Kyosuke, protecting and shielding his body with her own. At the same time, Kyoko, who had shouted the order, grabbed the creature's shoulder and what she perceived to be its throat and threw it across the bridge. Tumbling through the air, it crashed onto the metal deck and slammed into the large transparent view port at the front. Quickly righting itself the creature thrashed its spiny tail about, waving the long knife-like tip in Kyoko's direction.

Akamiya and Nakashima rushed for the door. Kyoko caught Akamiya's arm, stopping her. "If that window were compromised, there's some kind of shield that would come down, right?"

Trying to get Kyoko's hand off of her, Akamiya barely managed to catch the question. "Wha- uh, yes! It cuts off the entire front section of the bridge. Let me-"

Kyoko spotted the line on the floor where the emergency wall would come up from. She also saw a control console on the other side of it. "Stay here."

Before Sayaka or the others could even think to try and stop her, Kyoko bolted across the bridge. The creature charged as well, it toothy maw gaping open as it screeched. Kyoko leapt off the floor, landing on the back of the captain's chair and coming to an instant halt. Her foe kept coming, leaping into the air to tackle her to the floor. Leaning forward, Kyoko pushed off of the chair and headbutted the monster in the chest, knocking it out of the air. Both fell back down and were up again right away. The pointed tail darted in to impale her. Kyoko snapped her wrist down and caught it, pulling it around behind her and wrapping it around her waist. She clamped her other hand further along its tail and pulled the beast in toward her, kicking it away again with all her strength.

The tail broke off in her hand, and the monster flew back into the window. The transparent material, though much stronger than glass, cracked under the impact. Kyoko ripped the tail apart in her hands, throwing the pieces down at the feet of the creature that was now regaining its footing. She stopped momentarily, seeing the blood dripping from the shredded tail eating into the metal plating beneath it.

Growling, she noticed the burning sensation coming from her own clothes. The acidic blood began to eat into the skin on her legs and arms. Breathing heavily, she pointed her finger accusingly at the beast before her. "You and I aren't through! But-" She turned on her heel and dashed across to the console, smashing her fist into its screen and grabbing a handful of wiring. She hadn't planned out how to do this, nor had she known she could do it until the moment came. It was almost purely instinctual. Raw power channeled through her body into the console, jolting the computer core and shocking it into obeying her will. Electricity flew from the console, scorching her now-bare arms and setting her hair on fire.

The emergency door slammed shut, closing her and her foe off from the rest of the ship.

She turned back to face it, head wreathed in flames that were consuming her hair. The electricity ran through her body, stimulating her muscles and causing them to involuntarily tense. "YOU'RE GONNA PAY!"

* * *

Sayaka stood up, all but forgetting about Kyosuke. "Kyoko!"

A monotone computerized voice came over the ship-wide speakers. _"Warning! Complete depressurization of the forward bridge! Warning! Complete depressurization of the forward bridge!"_

"KYOKO!"

* * *

Madoka had just arrived in the mess hall with Hitomi and Homura, where they found Captain Douglas talking with Mami, when the alarm went off. They had all heard the announcement.

Tyrone stood up and rushed to a control panel next to the door. "Computer! Shipboard life signs! Now!"

_"Seventeen life signs on board."_

The captain pointed across the room. "Someone check the hamster cage!"

Mami got up and ran to the other side of the mess hall where she found a small, pudgy ball of fluff obliviously chewing away at the side of an almond. She shook her head. "Tiberius is fine."

Tyrone turned back to the panel. "Computer! Rollcall! Now!"

_"Captain Tyrone Douglas, mess hall, alive. Naomi Akamiya, bridge, alive. Kagomi Akihara, sick bay, alive. Chie Nakashima, bridge, alive. Mio Fukawa, sick bay, alive. Daichi Kagima, engineering, alive. Rorland Douglas, engineering, alive. Hitomi Shizuki, mess hall, alive. Homura Akemi, mess hall, alive. Satoshi Osakawa, sick bay, comatose. Kenichi Ira, cargo hold, deceased. Kousaka Tamahoshi, engineering, deceased. Kyosuke Kamijou, bridge, deceased."_

Madoka practically had to catch Hitomi to keep her from collapsing to the floor.

_"Alert! Unidentified life forms on board! Three in mess hall! One on bridge! One in sick bay! One in engineering! Three unreadable! Two in mess hall! One on bridge! Three unknown xenomorphic life forms! One, larva, mess hall! One, larva, sick bay! One, adult, engineering!"_

Madoka looked up from where she had set Hitomi down at one of the tables. "Xenomorphic?"

_"And one hamster, mess hall, alive."_

Mami held up her hand. "Wait a second. Madoka, would the ship's scanners likely not recognize us?"

Tyrone answered first. "I guess not, but then-"

Mami finished for him. "There's only three?"

Homura cut in. "Why wouldn't the ship recognize you? It should, shouldn't it?"

Shaking her head, Madoka diverted the subject to something for more pressing. "It said xenomorphic. And there's a larva here in the mess hall?"

Homura shrugged. "What's a larva?"

The door opened and Akihara entered the mess with Fukawa on her heels. "Captain, what's going on? We heard that the bridge depressurized? Is anyone hurt?"

"Is anyone hurt!?" Hitomi stood up, shouting over everyone else and silencing them. "People are dead! My husband is dead! There are _monsters_ on the ship!"

A shrill scream echoed through the ship, setting all of them on edge. Homura jumped at the sound. "What the hell was that?"

Tyrone mashed the keys on the control panel. "Computer! Ship-wide speakers! Track and announce all life forms on board!"

_"Confirmed."_

He turned and kicked in a bulkhead beside the panel, pulled the metal plating out and tossed it aside, then reached in and pulled out a pair of pistols. He handed one to Fukawa. "We're headed to engineering. Front or back?"

Fukawa hefted the weapon and grimaced. "Back."

Akihara cut in. "Sir, she's injured."

Ignoring her, he stepped out into the hall. "Sick bay, first. We need a few e-tags."

As the captain had commanded, the ship's computer announced a change the moment it was detected. _"Alien xenomorph adult has exited engineering."_

Gritting his teeth, the captain looked back at the group still waiting in the mess hall. "Alright, I'm in front. Mami is right behind me. Kaname, Akemi, stay in the middle with Miss Shizuki. Akihara brings up the rear with Fukawa acting rear guard."

Akihara, Hitomi, and Homura all had their individual complaints that he totally ignored. Mami took up her position, and Madoka pulled Homura and Hitomi along with her. Fukawa nudged Akihara into complying as well, and the group began moving.

_"Alien xenomorph larva has exited mess hall. Two unreadable life forms have left mess hall."_

Hitomi raised her voice. "Captain, it's following us. Where the hell is it?"

Fukawa called from the back. "I can't see anything behind us."

Madoka glanced behind her. "What if it's under the floor?" She stopped. "Akihara, get down."

Instead of doing as she was told, the woman spun to look behind her. Having silently dropped from the ceiling, a hideous black monster now stood hunched between her and Fukawa. It wrapped its large clawed hands around her head, holding her in place. Its toothy maw opened and a smaller tongue-like appendage tipped with another mouth shot out, punching through her head and splattering Madoka with blood. It dropped her and pounced after Madoka. Behind it, Fukawa raised her gun and fired three shots into its dark exoskeleton. Spurts of greenish liquid came from the spots where she hit it, and the monster growled in pain. It turned to her, leaving Madoka.

Fukawa backpedaled, turned, and ran the other direction. The alien launched after her, tearing through the halls and carelessly ripping up the floor plating as it went.

_"Kagomi Akihara, deceased."_

Hitomi grabbed Madoka's arm. "Come on, we have to get out of here!"

The five of them barreled down the halls as fast as their feet could carry them, making their way down to the sick bay. Nearly skidding to a halt, Tyrone stopped in front of the door, opened it, and rushed in. Mami stood just outside, watching as he tore the room apart around the still-comatose Osakawa. Homura, Hitomi, and Madoka stopped behind her.

"What is he doing?" Homura peered it, then looked back at Mami. "Has he gone crazy?"

Hitomi grabbed Homura and pulled her away. "You saw that thing too! That's what we're up against! He's looking for the larva, because I hope to God that what we saw was the adult!"

Madoka shoved them apart and stepped into the sick bay. "Can I get a towel?"


	11. Predators

Madoka was busy wiping Akihara's blood off her face, looking into the small mirror in sick bay. Hitomi and Homura stood just outside in the corridor, quietly and nervously keeping watch down the hallway in either direction. Tyrone was doing something in the far corner, next to the comatose Osakawa. He had explained something about e-tags, which were electronic implants for tracking and identification. Madoka had opted out, but Mami was willing to accept it.

For a moment, Madoka felt dizzy. She braced herself against the counter in front of her. "Damn it... I need a drink."

Homura peered in from the hall. "Madoka, are you alright?"

She shook her head. "Something just feels... off. Feel like I should have stayed asleep today."

Homura frowned. "I know how you feel. My stomach has been upset all day. I suppose it could just be from sitting in cryo for so long, but-" Gunshots cut her off, bullets ricocheting down the hall around her. She ducked into the sick bay, then poked her head out to see who was shooting at them.

Hitomi stepped in, shoving Homura back. "Get the fuck out of the way!" She smacked the control panel on the wall, closing the door just as more shots bounced off the door frame. She turned to the rest of the room. "Captain, that's one of yours shooting at us. Semi-automatic. They've been to the armory, so it can't be Fukawa or the ones on the bridge."

Tyrone tossed his pistol over to Hitomi, who caught it deftly. He nodded. "Make sure they know who they're shooting at and bring them in here. We can use that weapon. And please try not to hurt them. Shoot only if they leave you no choice."

Hitomi rolled her eyes. She opened the door and took cover just outside the hall. She leaned forward a little and called out to whoever was out there. "Hey! Rory, is that you? Your brother is in here! If you're not Rory, fire off a few shots!" Right on cue, a spray of shots ricocheted around the hall near her. She immediately pulled back. "Whoever it is, they know we're here and they're still shooting." She shook her head. "Fire again if you're okay with us shooting back!" The response was the same.

Tyrone called over to her. "Hey, don't shoot to kill. Still one of my people."

"Sure." She stepped out and aimed down the hall, firing off a warning shot. The assailant stood up at fired off several rounds before Hitomi squeezed the trigger again, the shot taking them in the shoulder and dropping them on their back. Hitomi quickly patted herself down. She let out a quick laugh. "They all missed me."

A shot hit her leg from behind as another gun opened fire somewhere down the hall in the opposite direction. She fell over onto the wall and aimed behind her, firing off three quick shots. They all hit, and the second attacker collapsed onto the floor. She lowered the pistol and let out her breath.

The computer sputtered to life. _"Dai- -gima, de- -sed."_

Hitomi glanced over to the first attacker. "That looks like Akamiya. What's she doing down here?"

Homura jumped out into the hall and wrapped her arm around Hitomi, hauling her back into sick bay. She looked to Tyrone. "The computer is on the fritz already. We have to assume the tracking doesn't work anymore."

From out in the hall, they heard Akamiya feverishly murmuring. "Don't look outside. I can't see it... it can't see me... it saw me... Don't look outside."

Madoka groaned. "Great, what's she going on about?"

Homura set Hitomi down against the bulkhead and waved to Madoka. "We can't leave her out there, especially not with a gun we could really use right about now."

Madoka shrugged and followed Homura out into the hall. She grabbed Homura's shoulder and turned her around. "I'll get Akamiya, you get the other gun."

"Right." Homura nodded. "Yes. Okay."

Madoka watched Homura take a few steps in the other direction before moving over to Akamiya's side. She knelt down beside the wounded woman, grabbing the gun away from her. She leaned in close, cautiously addressing her. "Are you alright down there?"

Akamiya groaned quietly. "It hurts... it saw me... it hurts..."

Madoka sighed. "Of course it hurts. You were shot. Now quit complaining. We have to get you back to th-"

Akamiya exploded, showering Madoka in blood.

* * *

Sayaka swung as hard as she could, aiming straight for whatever was coming through the hatch onto the bridge. A young, dark-skinned man duck under the flying fist and raised his hands in defense. Sayaka stopped, realizing she was dealing with a Human. They both took a moment to catch their breath. A woman limped in behind the man, and then door closed.

Behind Sayaka, Nakashima cried out. "Fukawa! You're here!"

The man held his hand out to Sayaka. "We never got to meet. I'm Rorland." Before she could act on the offered hand, he held out a long rifle. "Can you use one of these?"

She took the weapon. "Yes. Why?"

Fukawa hoisted her own weapon. "I'm sure you heard the overhead. The captain must have ordered the ship's computer to do that, and from it we know that there are a number of alien lifeforms on the ship. We've already figured that the computer can't recognize you and your friends at all, but it identified xenomorphic lifeforms. There are three, from what we heard."

Sayaka grimaced. "Three... one of them got in here. It killed Kyosuke and..."

Nakashima finished. "It was in the forward section with Kyoko when it was sealed off and depressurized. And then Akamiya ran off on her own!"

Fukawa turned and aimed at the door she had come through. "Great. One of those things was chasing me. I don't know if I lost it or what, but we can't let our guard down." She shook her head. "And, uh... no. Sorry. There's still three. The depressurization came before the xenomorph warning. Either that thing held on tight or there _were _four."

Sayaka started to inspect her gun. "Yeah... I think we can take them."

Rorland grinned. "I'm for it."

Fukawa nodded. "Okay, are you sure we can hold out?"

Looking down the sights to test the weapon's aim, Sayaka corrected her. "That's not what we're doing. We're hunting those things down. They're going to pay for what they've done."

Nakashima waved her hands, shaking her head. "No way! No fucking way! We can't fight three more of those things!"

"Never underestimate..." Sayaka opened the door out into the corridor. "...a pissed off Miki."

A minute later, they were walking through the halls. Sayaka had point, with Rorland's rifle aiming over her shoulder. Fukawa was at the back, still limping behind the rest. Nakashima was in the middle, though against her will. She had resisted going out, but didn't want to stay behind all alone either. At every intersection, Sayaka and Rorland stopped the procession and cleared the corridors they would not be using before continuing on.

At one stop, Fukawa made an observation. "You know, Nakashima, Akihara was in the middle position when she died. It's not exactly any safer."

"Don't talk to me."

Sayaka started, then immediately stopped, causing everyone behind her to bump into each other. She looked down the corridor ahead of them, then at the door on her right. "Where does this go?"

Rorland nodded. "That's engineering. Fukawa's station."

"What's that noise?" Before anyone else could say anything, Sayaka answered her own question. "Oh, must be the engines. With that incessant mindless throbbing I thought someone was playing Muse."

"What?"

Sayaka rolled her eyes. "You don't know what Muse is. Why couldn't I have been born in your time?" She shook it off and opened the door. "Well, maybe there's someone in-" She stopped cold, her eyes fixing on the huge black creature climbing down the side of the reactor core. She couldn't tell if it was the same one that killed Kyosuke, the one Kyoko took with her, but it was definitely the same species. Rage suddenly flared within her, and she raised her rifle at the monster. "THERE IT IS!"

There wasn't any time for anyone to stop her.

* * *

Madness, in high enough concentrations, can have a physical presence. It has mass. When there is enough of it, it can warp things. Warp minds, space, time, and matter. The closer Ghroth drifted to the _Prometheus_ and the _Epimetheus_, the more of their hulls twisted and changed, breaking and falling into decay. Anyone who chanced a look outside and saw the colossal form drawing near would have surely had their minds and even their bodies dreadfully effected.

The ship still wasn't damaged enough to fall out of the sky, though. At least, until someone shot a hole in the reactor core on the _Prometheus_. One by one, the engines cut out and the lights went dark. All systems began failing. Computerized emergency protocols, programs most protected from damage, managed to cut into place and begin closing blast doors across the ship. Madoka and Homura found themselves stuck just outside the sick bay, with Mami, Hitomi, and Captain Douglas trapped inside with Osakawa.

Madoka pounded on the blast door with her fists. "Damn it! I need a towel!"

Homura ducked into the corner, bracing herself. "Don't panic, Madoka. We're going to be fine. The emergency measures are in place, so we have nothing to worry about."

"I'm covered in blood, Homura. I need a towel. A shower too, if it isn't too much trouble." She fixed Homura with a blank stare. As familiar as she seemed, Madoka was very quickly learning that Homura probably wasn't someone she genuinely enjoyed being around. "You need to pull yourself together."

Homura shook her head, ducking into a corner. "No, no, this is just like my nightmares. We're all going to die again! Don't you get it, this is exactly what happened!"

Looking back at Homura from inspecting the outline of the door, Madoka rolled her eyes. "Don't be ridiculous. There were no black people in your dream."

"Madoka..." Homura braced herself against the wall. "The ship's hull is heating up. It's an uncontrolled atmospheric entry. We're going down. Hold on to something."

Madoka grimaced, looking down at the exploded remains on the floor. "She's probably gonna go flying all over the place. This is gonna be great, I can tell." She braced herself in front of the door without bothering to sit. "Did the ship crash in your dream?"

* * *

Nagisa had initially thought it weird, living as this giant Witch form. Of course, she'd gotten quite used to it over the countless years, but it never truly ceased to be interesting to float around in the air. It was something she never got tired of, and she meant _never_.

She knew the others had gotten on a ship and went up into orbit, and she was just waiting for them to come back and get her. Then they would all continue on their journey together. She looked up at the sky to see if they were returning yet.

Something was coming down, and coming down fast. Whatever it was, it was burning up on reentry and only picking up speed. She'd seen more than a couple meteors hit, but this one looked different. It was tumbling strangely, almost as if it was made up of two separate entities both fighting for control. It certainly wasn't a ship, so her curiosity got the better of her and she headed to where she estimated it would land.


	12. Requiem

Woe to you, o earth and sea, for the devil sends the beast with wrath, because he knows that his time is short.

**_YOUR WORDS ARE MEANINGLESS, SPECK!_**

"You can't truly believe that, or you're a fool."

**_THEN TELL ME NOW WHAT THE OMNIPOTENT SERVANT OF THE KING MIGHT LEARN FROM THE DUST._**

"You send this beast against us now, and I can feel it. This is a move of fear on your part. You wouldn't have done this if you didn't sense that your end was coming."

**_SILENCE! YOU ARE NOTHING! YOU ARE THE OFFSPRING OF VAIN WORDS AND HYPOCRITICAL ACTIONS! YOU ARE A CHILD OF WEAK FAITH INTERTWINED WITH ABSENT GODS! NO WORDS YOU CAN IMAGINE COULD BROACH THE MAGNITUDE OF MY BEING!_**

Kyoko opened her eyes, burning with fire and trailing light behind her as she fell through the atmosphere of the cake planet. The black creature writhed in her hands, trying desperately to tear her apart with its huge claws. Its mouth snapped at her, ripping into her shoulders, but the wounds caught fire and healed in the flame. Still, her focus was on the otherworldly voice that had broken into her mind to taunt her.

**_I CANNOT BE DEFEATED! I WILL NEVER BE BROUGHT LOW! ALL THIS UNIVERSE AND MORE IS UNDER MY DOMAIN! TEN THOUSAND TO THE TRILLIONTH POWER SUPERNOVAS GO UNNOTICED BY THE INSECTS THAT FLIT ABOUT THE MOTES AT MY FEET AS IF THEY WERE GODS! I AM SALDOR!_**

"Then send your beasts. Send them and watch them fall."

The alien was crushed and vaporized moments from hitting the ground, a stream of brilliant energy obliterating its atoms. Rising from the smoldering crater, Ophelia raised her spear over the flames that made up her head. Her steed reared up on its hind legs, stamping at the air, its white mane flowing from its neck. Her free hand ran along the fringe of her kimono before moving up to meet the other on the shaft of the spear, bringing the massive weapon down against the ground and lighting it all on fire.

"Send your beasts if you dare!"

Charlotte approached slowly. "Ophelia? That was quite the entrance."

Relaxing her shoulders, Ophelia looked up to the sky. "The others are coming now..."

Charlotte followed her fellow Witch's gaze.

The sky erupted in flames, the mass of the two sister ships burning up as they began to reenter the atmosphere. The steel hulls buckled and glowed as they were battered with immense friction and heat. The frame warped and twisted as the two ships broke apart. _Epimetheus_ spiraled away, exploding and scattering across the sky. It's pieces fell to the ground, most burning away long before they ever reached the surface. _Prometheus_ continued straight on its course, taking the fall at a much better angle.

Charlotte looked back to Ophelia. "It's coming this way. Should we move?"

Ophelia's flame died down, an expression of some sort that Charlotte didn't understand. She could guess pretty well from what Ophelia said. "Yeah, I think we should."

Charlotte bolted away like a shark after prey. Ophelia rode away behind her, her horse's hooves breaking the cake ground as she went. If they had waited any longer, it would have been too long. The _Prometheus_ hit the ground behind them, sending them both flying in the shock wave. Ophelia fell off her horse and crashed through a small outcropping of peanut brittle. Charlotte left a long trail in the ground where she landed, sending cake into the air for nearly five hundred meters.

Ophelia pulled herself up and looked over the crashed ship. "Gee... I hope they're okay." She spotted something moving. A lot of somethings. Small black shapes in the distance running on all fours toward the crashed ship. "Charlotte! We've got trouble!"

Charlotte pulled herself out of the cake and shook the crumbs out of her eyes. "Trouble? What kind of trouble?" She saw the aliens as well. "Oh cripes."

They exchanged only a quick glance before both charging.

* * *

Sayaka shot back up, her eyes darting around. The hull of the ship was cracked and broken, light from outside streaming in. The others in her group were pulling themselves up at various different speeds. She let out her breath when she concluded that they were all fine. Fukawa was still limping, but she'd been hurt before the crash. Rory and Nakashima seemed a little bruised, upset, and dirty, but were otherwise fine.

Sayaka shouldered her pilfered rifle. "See, now that's how you kick some serious alien ass."

Another of the black aliens appeared through a hole in the hull, reaching down a long claw and grabbing at Fukawa. Its hand wrapped around her head and it hauled her into the air, but before Sayaka could even ready her rifle to fire a giant red spear smashed the beast apart. Fukawa fell back into the corridor and frantically wiped the remaining slime off her face.

A spattering of the alien's blood began to drip down from above, corroding through the hull and eating away at the steel. It hit the deck below them and kept going. Fukawa dashed away from the acidic blood, taking shelter behind Sayaka. Rory and Nakashima were trapped on the other side of the acid. Sayaka looked up to see the giant form of Ophelia.

"Kyoko..."

Ophelia waved briefly, then turned and batted away another alien. She looked back down at Sayaka. "Get them out of here. There's a whole army of those things heading your way and I can't get through the hull in time to stop them. They're inside the ship!"

Sayaka looked back down at Rory and Nakashima as Ophelia turned back to face more of the monsters outside. "Come on! We have to go! Now!" Rory covered his head and ran under the dripping acid, miraculously making it through without a scratch. Sayaka looked to Nakashima. "Hurry! There are more of those things coming!"

Nakashima had just about gathered up the necessary courage to run through the dripping acid when an arc of electricity flared behind her, illuminating the dark corridor to her back. Sayaka, Rory, and Fukawa saw the virtual wall of the monsters squirming and writhing right behind her. They overtook Nakashima in an instant, tearing her apart before their eyes and continuing their charge as if she wasn't even there.

"RUN!"

The three of them turned and ran full speed. Reaching a corner, Sayaka stopped and let the others go on without her. She turned and raised her rifle, emptying the entire clip into the horde approaching. For every one that she killed, another crawled right past it and took its place. She pulled the clip out and replaced it, emptying that one as well. The black mass kept coming unabated. Sayaka dropped the gun and stood.

"Alright, you alien assholes! In the words of my generation: fuck you!"

The next second, the mass of black aliens met the full force of the harder-than-steel armor of Oktavia von Seckendorff.

* * *

Hitomi opened her eyes, coughing out some black dust. She looked around her at the dark room. The walls were crushed and warped, the equipment of the sick bay scattered about and broken. She was surprised she had survived. She saw holes in the hull leading out to the corridor and to other parts of the ship. Half the deck was also missing.

Captain Douglas sat up, finding himself pinned against the wall by the unconscious Osakawa. He shoved the other man off of him and stood up. Glancing around, Hitomi caught his eye. "You alright?"

Hitomi sat up and groaned. "In pain, but alright."

The door to the sick bay fell in, and Madoka stepped through. "How's everyone doing? I need a towel."

Douglas shook his head. "I can't find Mami." He pointed at the hole in the deck. "I think she might have fallen down there."

Homura wobbled in behind Madoka. "Down there? That's the cargo bay, isn't it?"

Douglas nodded. "Let's go."

There was a wet cracking sound from the corner of the room. Silently, all four of them turned to look at Osakawa. He was still unconscious, laying in the corner. Another crack came from him, with no sign of what it was. After a third crack, his chest started moving. It wasn't moving like breathing, but bulging out in the center. After a fourth crack, the middle of his chest began to turn red with blood.

Homura covered her face with her hands. "Oh my God! What's happening to him?!"

Osakawa's chest burst open and a small pale alien's head poked out, wasting no time in screeching at them. Homura screamed. Madoka and Hitomi ducked out of the room, grabbing Homura and pulling her along. Douglas took one glance at the hole in the deck that led down to the cargo bay. He reached out and grabbed the bed, no longer in the center of the room, and lifted it over his head before bringing it crashing down on top of Osakawa and the alien spawn, crushing them both.

Douglas turned to the door. "Its dead! Come on!"

Madoka peered back into the sick bay. "Oh. I coulda done that."

"Let's go!" He jumped down into the cargo bay.

Madoka looked to Hitomi and Homura. "Cargo bay."

The three of them crowded around the hole in the deck and climbed down as best they could before being forced to drop the rest of the way. Douglas was way ahead of them. The entire cargo bay had broken in half, and the deck beneath the sick bay was on an angle. Douglas was at the bottom, pulling apart pieces of debris and throwing them aside. Hitomi sat down and watched as Madoka slid down the angled deck and started to help him.

Homura looked over at Hitomi. "You're not helping?"

"My leg... I think I'd just get in the way right now." She looked back. "What about you? Aren't you going to help?"

The were interrupted by Madoka calling out. "I found her! Mami!"

Douglas jumped on her, pulling bent pieces of metal off of the pile. "Mami! Mami, are you alright?"

The two of them had to work together to move the last piece out of the way, and almost dropped it back on top of her when they saw what was under it. Mami coughed harshly, unable to move her hand to her mouth as it was trapped under a large crate. There was blood coming from under the crate, leaving no doubt that it had crushed her arm. Worse, there were several thick cables sticking straight up out of her, having gone right through her body. Blood leaked out of her mouth as she wheezed again. At the other end of the cargo bay, Fukawa and Rory ran out of a corridor. They slowed down when they spotted Homura and Hitomi, and stopped dead when they saw the rest.

Mami felt Douglas' hand wrap around her own. She smiled. "I was... waiting for you... to come."

Madoka backed away. She felt like this was their moment, and she shouldn't get in the way.

Douglas gripped Mami's hand tightly. "You just hold on now. We'll get you out of this and fix you up. You're going to make it."

Mami shook her head. It was barely visible, but he could tell. "Don't worry... Ty... I know I'm going to be... okay." She gasped. "It hurts a lot."

"We'll get you out of there, Mami. You'll be fine."

"No, see... look at my side... see that piece?"

He looked down to see one of the cables sticking out of her side, just above her hip. "I see it. Mami, I-"

"It went in my back... and I guess it got bent... it's... practically wrapped around my spine. You're not getting me out."

"No. No, we'll find a way. We'll get it out. You'll be fine. You'll see. You'll see."

"Listen... when I go... I won't be able to tell you... what I want to say... so let me say it now."

"...okay."

Struggling, she lifted her hand up to reach his face. "I missed you so much."

"I missed you too."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

"I'll miss you when we go."

"I'll miss you too."

She gave a short laugh. "You... do you know... what you said to me... the last time we parted ways?"

"No." He shook his head. "No I don't. What did I say."

"You said... we will meet again."

"That's exactly what you said before you left."

"It's... a miracle... that we found each other again in... in all this empty space. I can't imagine... we'd be so fortunate... that it would happen... again..."

He squeezed her hand. "It was good to see you again."

"At least this time... I get to... say... good... bye..." Mami closed her eyes. "I'll... always... love... you..."

Just as she went completely still, a cool breeze blew around them. Douglas, Madoka, and the others looked up to see the shining form of Candeloro floating over them. Madoka knew the others wouldn't recognize it, but she could tell that Candeloro's form had changed. The sorrows of the Witch were alleviated. The darkness was gone, leaving behind only the shimmering blue dress and the yellow frills and ribbons. The radiant light that washed over them was warm and purifying.

Candeloro moved over their heads, floating towards the far side of the cargo bay just as a swarm of the alien monsters crawled out of the corridors on either side of them. Her ribbons snaked gracefully through the air and pierced the aliens straight through, turning them all to light which quickly dissipated. The ribbons moved on, sliding through the cracks in the cargo bay bulkheads and pulling them apart, opening up and escape for the survivors.

Out beyond the hull of the ship, Madoka could see three more huge forms waiting for them. Her friends were ready to leave.


	13. Dread Songs and Those Who Sing Them

Homura and Hitomi stood outside the crash of the _Prometheus_. Madoka was not far off, speaking to the four giant Witches. Captain Douglas was helping his brother and Fukawa out of the crash. Just as Fukawa was out, and the three of them were joining the rest of the group, Madoka returned from among the Witches.

"We can't really send you home, because you wouldn't arrive any sooner than several billion lightyears. We can't just leave you here either, because this planet's atmosphere isn't the safest. You would die a slow and very jittery death. What I can do, though, is put you in stasis where you would be frozen until the stasis capsule makes physical contact with something that matches... whatever parameters I want it to. We could make it Human, if that would be best."

Douglas nodded. "If that's the best you can give us, we'll take it."

"Okay." Madoka's gaze dropped to the ground. "Well... we can't stay here much longer. The presence of those three in that state is more damaging than the air here. Candeloro... Mami seems to be fine, though. Once I change into that state, we'll have to leave right away or the planet will be destroyed. It's going to happen really soon, so I don't have time for long goodbyes. Hitomi?"

Her childhood friend shuffled her feet casually. "It was... nice to know that you'll always be out there, Madoka."

Madoka let out a sad sigh. "I'm sorry. For everything that happened. I'm sorry about Kyosuke." She looked to Captain Douglas. "More for Mami than for me, but it was nice to see you again." She just nodded to Rory, who nodded back, and moved on to Fukawa. "I've never met you or even seen you before, but I'll remember you."

Fukawa shrugged. "Well, I don't suppose I can ask for more than to be remembered... what was it, for eternity?"

Madoka gave a somber laugh, and turned to Homura. "Now, I don't remember you either, but you feel so familiar. I think I understand why, too. Kyoko told me that it was your voice I heard coming from deep space. You, or some other version of you, called to me, and it's that voice I've been following out here. You are our objective Homura. You're more important than we know."

Homura lowered her head, sadly turning her gaze to the ground. "I didn't dream those horrible things. My friends really did die, and I'm the only one left. And now you're going to go away again. How am I supposed to live with this?"

Madoka put her hand on Homura's shoulder. "You've been alone a long time, Homura. But you're not alone anymore. Hitomi will be there with you. And Tyrone and Rory and Fukawa. You're not alone."

"Madoka... please... if I can't go with you, then there's no point." Homura took a deep breath, and Madoka could tell she wasn't going to like what came next. "Don't put me to sleep again. I want to stay awake. If I can't be with you ever again, then let me watch you go. I'll accept whatever end this planet can give me, but don't make me sleep so long again."

Madoka couldn't find any words to say. She let out a long sigh, but made no move to force her hand. Homura watched quietly as Madoka formed the static blue fields that wrapped around the others, placing them in perfect stasis. She turned to face Homura one last time before leaving. After a minute of silence, she just nodded and started walking back to the others. Homura could hear a tune that someone was humming. She naturally assumed it was Madoka, as no one else was around to do something like that. Watching Madoka leave like this hurt, though. Tears started to well up in her eyes as Madoka's body dissolved into tendrils of shadow that quickly wrapped around the three Witches and whatever Mami had become.

The tendrils came together, binding into a single solid wall and making a large egg-like shape. The black mass that was Homura's dearest friend lifted off the ground and floated up into the sky. She reached up and waved farewell to Madoka until the small black dot in the sky vanished. Crying, she dropped to her knees and clutched at her heart. There was a pain in her chest like she'd never felt before. She wasn't alone.

* * *

Madoka opened her eyes. Something was wrong. She was supposed to be flying through space as Kriemhild Gretchen right now, not lying on her back as Madoka Kaname and in serious pain. She rolled over and shoved herself up onto her feet. The ground was scorched and burnt, and she was in the center of a crater, like she'd hit like a meteor. Around her, Kyoko, Sayaka, and Mami struggled to stand as well. Nagisa shoved her way out of the ground where she'd evidently been buried.

The young white-haired woman spat out some dirt. "Blech. Overcooked chocolate cake."

Sayaka stomped the ground. "We're back on this miserable planet?! What happened?!"

Madoka tried to take a step, but the ground cracked and crumbled under her. She pointed to Kyoko, who was nearest the edge of the crater. "Go find Homura! Make sure she wasn't hit!"

Kyoko clambered up to the edge of the crater and looked out. "Oh." She turned back to the others. "It's... not good. We didn't hit her, but... she's already dead. One of those things... one of them was still inside her, and..."

Madoka hauled herself out of the crumbling ground, pulling herself along in desperation. "No! No, Homura! Not after everything we just went through! No!"

Mami grabbed Madoka and held her back. "Madoka, stop this! We have more important things to worry about!"

"You don't understand!" Madoka tried in vain to push Mami away. In spite of her attempts, Mami was physically the stronger of the two. "You don't understand! Any of you! Homura's the whole reason for all of this! It was her voice!" Madoka had started crying, shouting at them through her tears. "I heard her voice and that's why we're out here in the first place! There is nothing more important! She's the reason for everything!"

"Oh... shit." Sayaka pointed up at the sky. "I think Mami's right this time."

Madoka finally broke free. Slowly, she followed Sayaka's finger. Directly above them, hovering in the sky, was a massive sphere. Whatever it was, it was in orbit, it was bigger than all of them, and it hadn't been there before. Someone was humming a low tune.

There, above them, Ghroth opened his eye and stared down at them. The entire planet was cast in the red glow of his eye. The voice shook the planet to its core. **Come to me, Witch. Awake and be destroyed.**

Madoka stood in defiance of the colossal foe. "Now you've done it, you giant floating gonad! You want me? Here I come!" Kriemhild Gretchen launched into space, aiming to collide with the Nemesis Moon.

The others followed right behind her, though less than enthusiastic.

Ophelia darted left and right, trying to size up their foe. "That's no moon! Look at the size of that thing!"

Oktavia chastised her. "Don't be a nerd."

Kriemhild streaked past between them, drawing Ghroth's gaze away from the planet. It was a wise move. His eye began to glow brighter and suddenly erupted, shooting off a beam of energy that rivaled a solar flare in sheer force. The blast that would have cracked the planet open instead struck Kriemhild dead on, sending her spiraling out into space. Taking the opportunity, Charlotte latched onto the top of Ghroth's mass with her mouth and began chewing her way through. The fiend was not made of rock, but rather something infinitely more vile, but much easier to chomp.

Candeloro emitted a bright white glow and flew past in front of Ghroth. He took the bait, following her farther away from the planet. He had started screeching repeatedly, but his one-eyed expression hadn't changed. Oktavia and Ophelia landed on either side of the giant eye, where they could feel the heat coming off of it, and stabbed their respective weapons into the softer tissues of the eye. When Ghroth tried to shut his eye, to protect it from further damage, they both grabbed the stone eyelids and held them open. Candeloro darted away. Behind her light, Kriemhild had been all but invisible, and was now charging at near light speed. She struck her foe head on, a bullseye, spearing him and breaking out the other side. Charlotte wormed her way out the bottom. Out of all four holes, Kriemhild and Charlotte's entry and exit wounds, molten plasma like from the surface of a star poured out into the black.

The plasma changed shape, revealing the true nature of Ghroth's form. Pure, bright orange, infernal energy. Three long clawed arms and one toothy maw, all formed from the same plasma. The moon shell cracked and began disintegrating. Ophelia flew away, trying to get out of reach, and one of the arms shot after her. Oktavia intercepted the arm and slashed the clawed hand apart with her sword. A second arm swiped after her, but she spun to the side and severed it as well. Pulling a u-turn, Ophelia hoisted her spear and launched it like a javelin. Ophelia's spear shattered the moon shell, and what was left of the rock melted into the core, Ghroth's true being.

Fangs of fire snapped after Charlotte, and Ghroth chased her farther from the planet. Charlotte led the fiend straight for the nearest star. Kriemhild's dark tendrils wrapped around Ghroth from behind and pulled him back. She was gaining strength as the battle went on, growing in size and power, feeding off of all Ghroth's endless rage. She hauled him back and spun around, slinging him straight at the star. He hit the surface with a splash, sending solar matter in all directions and warping the shape of the celestial body itself. He shoved off the surface and charged back at Kriemhild. Arms of plasma and tendrils of shadow clashed, and Kriemhild found herself staring into Ghroth's burning red eye. She caught his arms and kept the claws from snatching at her, but the jaws slipped through and tore a chunk out of her.

Candeloro rammed into the jaws, tearing the entire limb off and taking it with her. In retaliation, Ghroth's eye erupted again, blasting Kriemhild away from him. Oktavia landed on his back, driving her sword into the top of his being. Ophelia dug her spear into his side, plunging it in as deep as she could. Ghroth grabbed the both of them and flung them away, then retreated to the star. Kriemhild charged after him, but Candeloro moved to block her path.

"That sun is more powerful than any of us. We can use it to destroy him."

Kriemhild fell back. "I'm the only one who can hope to match his power. What do you suggest?"

Candeloro glowed brightly. "You're right about that. In fact, I think you're somewhat larger than him. So I'll be your support. You drive him into it."

The others were mounting another attack, distracting Ghroth. He dug his claws into the surface of the star, scooping out clumps of stellar matter and hurling them at his enemies. One of the balls of flame struck Oktavia, sending her reeling into the black. A small splash of fire from the impact hit Charlotte, causing her to dart away for the safety of the planet. Ophelia took the next shot head on and shot straight through it, only to be swatted away by one of Ghroth's limbs.

Kriemhild wrapped Candeloro in her substance, enveloping her whole, and charged. She put all her strength and mass behind the attack, shrugging off the blasts of solar matter that struck her, and hitting Ghroth, grappling with him. She plunged them both into the star, below the surface, where both their beings were burned away and destroyed by the solar might. Inside Kriemhild Gretchen, Candeloro struggled to keep up, healing Kriemhild as much as she could and as fast as she could. They wouldn't be able to last long this way, but perhaps longer than Ghroth.

Charlotte and Ophelia floated motionlessly. Oktavia had tanked the blast hurled at her by Ghroth and pulled her friends back to her. Ophelia was unconscious, but still living. Oktavia and Charlotte's gaze was on the surface of the star, watching and waiting to see if Kriemhild and Candeloro would return. The star grew dark, shrinking and dying. Suddenly, the surface broke apart, and Kriemhild Gretchen pushed her way out into space. She released Candeloro from her mass, and the two returned to their friends.

The eternal legends tell of the Grave Star, the final resting place of the Nemesis Moon Ghroth.


	14. Nagisa no Kodoku

Erman was a young man, a great student and rather brilliant linguist. He was the top of his class at the university of Shalvok, and was working on a paper about long-dead languages. He could speak fluently every language known. Still, there was nothing in his skill set that would warrant him having to sign a non-disclosure agreement, at least as far as he could figure. Whatever it was, it had to be important. He signed the paper, and someone finally spoke for the first time since he'd entered the building.

"Please, come this way."

Getting up, he followed the uniformed man down the hall and out of the building to where he was ushered into a black car with black windows. They were taking him somewhere else, now. He couldn't see out, so he didn't know if they were taking him to another sector or if they were just driving in circles, but it took the better part of an hour. When they finally stopped and opened the door for him, he stepped out to find himself deep underground. A grey metallic tunnel that seemed to go on forever in each direction, the only thing breaking the endless grey was the occasional glowing light strip on the ceiling. And the door right beside the car.

"Inside, please."

Through the door he went, which opened like an elevator door. He thought it a little odd, until the small empty room on the other side started going down. At the bottom, the door opened again and he was ushered out into another empty hallway. The need for all this secrecy was weighing heavily on his mind, but at least he was pretty sure it meant they were not there to snuff him out, for whatever reason they might have to do that. At the end of the hallway was a double door, which one of the men guiding him along held open for him. None of them followed him in, instead closing the door behind him without a word. Now he was in an empty observation room, looking down at a strange sight. There was two women in the room below, which he had observed no way of reaching as the hall behind him also had no doors. The only thing he could think of was that the elevator must have had another place to stop. Otherwise, an entirely different and tirelessly long route would be required, and the more he thought about it the more he realized how likely that seemed.

The first of the women was a doctor, obviously. An older lady with white hair, probably several times his age. The second woman was lying in a bed, covered in a thin white sheet. No tubes were connected to her, no machines or instruments, nothing. She was just laying there, her eyes closed. This woman was younger, around his age, had a very unusually light skin tone and long white hair with the faintest hint of either blue or lavender, so faint that he couldn't tell which it was. This certainly didn't seem to be his area of expertise, but he was terribly curious.

The doctor looked up and spotted him. She grabbed a nearby device that really just looked like a green sphere and spoke into it. "The observation room is designed so that I can hear anything you say, and you can only talk and look. What's your name, young man?"

"Erman Kadestri. I assume you know why I'm here."

She nodded. "Yes. You're here to find out about this young lady. Who she is and where she's from."

"What can you tell me to start with?"

"Only that she was found floating around near the core, stark naked. She woke up about a day ago, but we have no idea what she's been saying."

The girl on the bed opened her eyes, like the conversation woke her up. She sat up, and the sheet dropped. She quickly covered herself when she spotted him in the observation room. She said something to the doctor, but it sounded totally foreign to him. Unlike any language he'd heard in his life, and he knew them all.

He cleared his throat. "Is, uh... is it possible for me to come in there?"

Over the course of the next day, Erman was shown to the room so he could sit with the doctor and the young woman. He'd been given a writing pad that he'd requested, as it would make communicating easier. At least, it was supposed to. She understood what it was, clearly, but nothing she wrote or drew made any sense. By the day's end, he'd tried absolutely every letter of every living language and ancient tongue, and nothing looked remotely familiar to her, if he was even reading her facial expressions right.

It had to be past midnight, and the doctor had left to get some sleep, when he was ready to surrender, to give up. They had made zero progress, and he didn't know what step to take next. She was sitting up in the bed, the sheet wrapped around her rather humorously, and the writing pad in her hands. She wasn't doing anything with it. Just sitting and staring at it. Perhaps she was just as frustrated as he was, and was simply hoping, waiting for some idea to come to her. Anything to help.

It had been a very long day and a half since he'd first seen her, and he'd gotten sleep only when she took a nap as well. He leaned back in the chair he'd been given and brushed his fingers through his hair. He looked over her, something he only got away with when she wasn't looking. He didn't know what she was saying, but he felt like her tone was clear enough whenever she caught him looking. She'd snapped at him and even shouted. If only he knew what she was shouting.

He let out a long sigh. "If I could have one wish right now, it would be enough to just be able to say one thing that you'd understand." She looked up at him, narrowing her eyes and trying to determine if he was crossing her boundaries again. "If I could say one thing... it would have to be 'Let me take you out on a date.'. But then, I don't even know if you're familiar with the concept of dates. I'd like to show you what it's like. I... don't really know if they'd even let me take you out of here. I guess not, at least until they know you're not dangerous somehow. But you don't look dangerous. You just look lost. At least as lost as me."

She turned back to the pad and scribbled something on it, then showed it to him. It was a simple, six-part pictograph, possibly a letter. He counted fourteen straight lines, one large curve, and one squiggle that may have been two smaller curves joined together. It was wholly foreign to him, and there wasn't even the slightest hint of what it meant or how to pronounce it, and he observed that it was even far simpler than everything else she'd written or drawn. That is, until she pointed at it and spoke slowly, enunciating each part of the word.

"_N-A-G-I-S-A._"

He looked over the otherwise senseless lines for a moment, before simply repeating what she'd said. "Nagisa." She nodded. "Nagisa. ...Are you hungry?"

It was pretty clear that she understood how far from the mark he'd hit. She erased the scribbles, which he was beginning to realize may have been an entire word comprised of several letters. She left only the first piece, two parallel lines joined by a diagonal line that went from the top of the parallel line on the left to the bottom of the line on the right. She pointed to the single, simplest thing she'd done yet and made a small sound.

"Nnnnnnnnnnnn..."

It was a letter. It was a letter and that was the sound it made. It looked so simple and easy, so small and insignificant, but it was the door to understanding her. He took the pad and wrote down the rest of the word she'd said before. It was very simple, he had no problem remembering exactly what it looked like. He checked with her to make sure he'd gotten it right, then proceeded to stare at it for several minutes. It took a moment, but knowing how simple the correlation between sounds and letters were, he worked his way through it. There was one letter that was present twice, and he remembered that the word she'd spoken also repeated a sound. The three in the middle followed, if he'd assumed correctly that each letter represented only one sound.

"Nagisa."

She said it faster, slower, and enunciated different parts of it differently, stressing different parts differently, but each time it was the same word. One word could sound so different so many ways, but it was always the same combination of five different sounds and one repeated. What did all the permutations mean?

She finished, pointing to herself. He was worried that body language might also fit into the equation, changing the mean yet again. She tapped her chest with her hand. "Nagisa."

Perhaps it was simpler than that. Perhaps, just like the letters, the word itself carried the same meaning every time, every different way it was said. Maybe... just maybe, it was her name. It seemed like a bit of a jump, but he figured if he were in her position he would attempt to communicate his name. For all he knew, she didn't even understand the concept of a name, but with an obvious written language he figured she probably did. And it was probably Nagisa.

He spent the next whole day tirelessly learning and memorizing the letter system that she used. Not all the letters were as simple, and he learned that many of them made several differing sounds depending on various forms of context, including the formations of the surrounding letters. Being the linguistic student that he was, even this foreign language was not so hard to keep up with all the various rules that he observed from her. He was hopeful that he would be able to start working on full words the following day.

The next day, they began by him teaching her to say his name. She seemed to have trouble with the concept that it was only his name when said with the precise speed, enunciation, stresses. Any variation could possibly mean something totally unrelated to him at all, and he was fully aware that one particular variant was considered offensive. A variant that she seemed to ultimately decide was close enough to his name, settling on just calling him that for the rest of the day. She didn't sound as concerned about his name as he was about her own.

The next thing he learned was that when she patted the bed in order to illustrate another word she'd written for him, the word she uttered did not mean 'pat', 'touch', 'feel', 'hit', or any other action that was remotely synonymous with what she was doing. She proceeded to grab the bed and lift the entire thing over her head, repeating the word before setting it down again. Needless to say, that one moment made him realize just why it may have been a decent choice to have her hidden away so far from the public knowledge. Her small size and pale complexion, which would normally be a telltale sign of illness or at least severe vitamin deficiency, belied a hidden strength that was frightening to say the least. It was a large bed, made of heavy alloys, solid through and through, built to not move without machinery and had the capacity to hold someone nearly thrice her height and up to seven times her body mass.

All this led him to learn the meaning of the word. It was the bed. The word, if he'd been paying attention right, likely referred to beds in general, not differentiating between large or small, who they were made for, hospital beds, restraining beds, sleeping beds, made or unmade, comfy or hard. All beds were called a bed.

Then she wrote down another word and picked up the pillow.


	15. Room For Growth

At one month, Erman had managed to sort out a few more words, but they'd begun to slow in progress. Nagisa had illustrated all the verbs she could think of, and every noun and adjective in the room had been exhausted. There was very little they could progress in those areas without her being allowed to go outside. He had gotten a hang of the alphabet she was using, though he'd also picked up on the fact that she knew more than one. They were working with the absolute simplest, by far the simplest lettering system he'd ever heard of. She had taught him the ins and outs of each letter and how some of them changed depending on context, but the rules were still very basic. It was a language of urgency, near as he could tell. From a culture where time must have been very short. He knew more relaxed languages tended toward longer words.

The only way to get any farther was to show her more things, but that would mean either bringing something down for her to see or taking her up to the surface. He'd said as much to the people in charge of the facility, but there was no way to tell if there was any chance of it happening. He'd been given a place to stay in a facility nearby, deep underground. There were three guard stations in rapid succession between him and the room where Nagisa was being kept, and it took him a good half hour to get through them all, but it wasn't more than two hundred meters. There was nothing for him to do in his room other than sleep, eat, and work on devising better means for communication. They'd given him a small whiteboard and a large one to work with, as well as a pair of markers and a towel for erasing. But he was running short on options.

It was on this day, just as he was heading out of his room to go see Nagisa and spend the day with her, that the doctor he had seen on the first day arrived. A tall man in a military uniform stood behind her. The doctor gave a slight bow, to which Erman responded with a deeper one. She smiled formally. "Erman, this is General Aster. He is here to see the progress you've made."

Erman had been informed that all information regarding Nagisa was to remain in the room with her. He was not to mention anything about her outside that room, even to the guards outside, and certainly not mention her name. He simply bowed to the General. "It's good to meet you. I was just headed there now."

The General returned the bow, far more shallow, but quickly turned away. "We never met, you understand. This did not happen."

"Naturally." Erman figured he could live with that. "Right this way."

He led the two of them through the guard stations, which took three times as long to pass due to there being three of them. Finally through with it all, they entered the small blank room where Nagisa sat alone on her bed. She smiled when she saw Erman, briefly regarded the doctor, and utterly ignored the General. He had expected perhaps some caution or nervousness about him, but she didn't seem interested in his presence at all.

Aster stepped ahead of Erman, then turned back to him. "So... what have you taught her?"

Erman wasn't entirely sure how to approach this. He knew they wanted him to teach her their language, but all he'd really accomplished was learning some of her language. "Alright, so for starters, the language she speaks is actually far simpler than ours, so I thought it would be better to learn how to talk to her than to teach her how to talk to us. We've primarily communicated by repeating a word and demonstrating its definition. It's also a an extremely primitive language, more so than any we have previously been aware of, and as a result I've come to realize that many of the words she says carry the same meaning regardless of most of the defining features of language as we know it. For example, her name is Nagisa. You can say that any way you want, faster, slower, higher, lower, enunciating it however you like, it's still her name somehow. I believe she may have a relatively large vocabulary as a result."

The General didn't seem to care too much about all the things he'd learned, but did latch onto one point in particular. "So it is not related to any known language at all?"

"No sir. Not in the slightest. Her written alphabet is so simple, some letters are comprised of no more than two straight lines."

"That's good." He nodded. "That's very good. You said you learned some of her language, then. Like what?"

He shrugged. "Oh, mostly just verbs and a few nouns. An adjective here or there."

"Verbs and nouns are what we're looking for. Can you give me a demonstration?"

"Sure..." Erman was starting to have misgivings about the General's intentions, but he went along with it. He turned to the subject of the conversation. "Nagisa." She had been watching him the whole time, but seemed to perk up when he said her name. "_Stand_." Reluctantly, she stood up. He thought for a moment before coming up with the right word. "_Spin_." She fixed him with a weird stare, but then complied. He got the feeling she was starting to understand what was going on.

Nagisa spun around once, then stopped and placed her hands on her hips. Finally, she acknowledged the General, looking him up and down. She said something, but Erman only picked up a couple words. The General looked to him, hoping for a translation.

Erman sighed. "We haven't gotten to full sentences yet. I don't know what she said." He paused, then straightened himself out. "Sir, I wanted to make a request. We've run out of things to demonstrate here, so I can't really learn anything more unless we got new material to work with. So, um..."

The General stood over him, a very stern look on his face, but then spoke very reassuringly. "You've made some good progress so far, from the looks of it. If you say you can't do any more here, then tell me what you need. We'll make sure you get it."

He took a deep breath. "I want to take her outside. Maybe have a safe place where she can stay, away from any population centers, but somewhere she can see and learn. I need a more open environment. I was thinking a house, a farmhouse maybe, in the Dhyaseil District. It's quiet, no commotion, they're used to visitors, don't ask questions, and wouldn't have a clue that her language is so unique. It's a great place to keep her away from the public eye, and would make my work so much easier in more ways than one."

The General frowned. "That's a bit much for you to be asking, but I see you're smart about it at least. I'll make sure your request is heard. It may take another month before we can get that done, but I see no reason to decline. I hope to see some progress out of this move, though. Listen to me. I want you to be able to mediate a conversation between her and me within a year. Bare minimum."

He nodded smartly. "I'm on a learning curve. I think most of the hard part is behind us."

* * *

The idea was that there would be no visible guards, so that when Erman and this strange girl entered the Dhyaseil District together, they wouldn't attract any major attention. There were curious neighbors, as there always are when a young couple moves from the city to the country, but they would think nothing odd of two kids making their way in the world. Erman just hoped he would be able to pass himself off as a guy who had married a girl he could barely communicate with. He wondered how long it would take before he was able to explain to Nagisa what the cover story was.

One day, he was shipped out to the Dhyaseil District to take a look at the house that was purchased for them. The farmhouse was now registered as belonging to 'Erman and Nagisa Kadestri'. There were large fields for crops surrounding the house, but nothing had been grown there for a long time. The last owner was a retired millionaire who could afford to just sit back and enjoy the end of his life. It was a good choice, and would allow him and Nagisa room to teach each other. He thought, maybe a bit selfishly, perhaps they could do more than that here. Perhaps they could build whatever life they wanted together.

He arrived by bus, made to look like public transportation but really he was the only one on it. The stop was a mile off from the farm property, which was itself a few miles across. The house was on the close side at least. It was on the long walk in, alone, that he realized how much work it would be to live here. Going anywhere and doing anything required being in shape. He wasn't out of shape, really, but this was something he would certainly have to work on. He reached the path up to the house, another half mile, and realized he had no idea how long it had been since he got off the bus.

Finally, after more walking at one time than he'd ever done in his life, he found himself standing in front of the farmhouse where he would be living for the foreseeable future. He took the next few steps, four steps up onto the front porch and reached out for the door. His first physical contact with the house, touching his fingertips on the door handle, was warm. Everything about the house felt warm. Peaceful. He stepped into the house.

All the rooms were empty. Wide and open, with dusty glass windows framed on the wall. The wooden floorboards and the late glow of sunlight cast a brown-gold atmosphere around him. The walls were thick and well-insulated, keeping the outside temperatures where they belonged and keeping the indoors temperature agreeable. The paint was holding up well for its age, only showing through or flaking off on rare occasions. Every room went the same way, and he started to imagine what it could look like.

Fields of wheat around the house would cast everything in a warmer golden glow. Soft furniture to sit on and look out the window at the world outside. Freshly grown food waiting in the kitchen to be prepared. And Nagisa resting peacefully on the soft cushions of the couch. He shook his head. He was letting his imagination get away from him. He needed to focus on the moment at hand.

The empty silence of the house returned, but the hope it held for him remained. This would be the place he would be staying with her. Maybe there was a General who wanted to command her, and maybe there was a government who wanted to find out where she came from. Maybe she was the point of interest for a number of scientific fields, and maybe no one would ever really know her true nature. All he wanted was to learn to communicate enough so that he could let her know, so that he could tell her, that he had fallen for her from the moment he first saw her.


	16. The First Night

Derek Selestera had lived on his old farm for his entire life, passed down to him by his parents the way was custom. His children had grown up there, and moved away when they were old enough to find their own way in life. Their children and grandchildren visited every year with them, the entire family coming down to the old farm. Derek and his wife Lallesti enjoyed the peaceful quiet of the country, and worked hard in the fields to earn their keep. He was driving home from the general store, sitting at the wheel of an old truck that was old when he was young, when he spotted something that caught his curiosity. He only drove this road once every couple months, as there was little they needed he couldn't produce on his farm. Just sugar, salt, and the phosphorescent fluids that kept the lights on the truck running. So he wasn't sure when someone had moved into the farmhouse along this road.

There was what looked to be a young couple standing out on the porch in front of the house. This meant new neighbors, and the only real way to deal with that was to go and say hello. He turned the old truck up the dirt driveway and made his way over to them. It was another two minutes, watching the farmhouse get closer and closer, and the features of the new neighbors getting more clear. The young man stepped off the porch to greet him, turning back to his partner and pantomiming something to her. Derek thought for a moment that perhaps she was deaf. He pulled up beside them. He wasn't about to get out, in the rare case they didn't want him there, but leaned out the window and held his hand out to the man.

"Hello, neighbor. You just move out to the country?"

The young man reached up and shook his hand. "Yes sir. Name's Erman. This is Nagisa."

"Well, I'm Derek. Me and the wife own the farm just to the West, last one before the border. You should come over soon. We'll welcome you properly to the area." He looked up to where Nagisa was standing on the porch. She was staring intently at him, like she couldn't decide what to make of him. He looked back to Erman. "You speak the language well enough, but I can tell you're not from these districts. Does she not speak the language at all, or..."

Erman smiled knowingly. "Nagisa only knows two languages, to the best of my knowledge. I'm still trying to learn just one of them."

He gave Erman a wink. "Trying to understand what women are saying? Good luck, son. I'll leave you to that then. Don't forget to drop by for dinner."

"When's a good time?"

"Oh, once you're settled in is fine. Our door is always open." With that, he sat up straight in his seat and started off down the driveway, heading for the road.

When the sound of the truck's engine had all but faded into the distance, Erman turned back to Nagisa. He wanted to say something to her now, but he knew there was nothing he could say. She wouldn't understand. He sighed and took his time plodding his way back up the stairs and to the front door. His mind quickly went back to trying to think of where to go next with Nagisa.

* * *

Nagisa was sure she'd heard that language before. The young man clearly could speak it fluently, and it seemed it was the local tongue. But unlike everything else she'd heard anyone say since the day she woke up, this one sounded vaguely familiar. She decided it was best to test the waters with the one phrase she'd tried her best to learn in as many languages as possible. It was the ideal way of learning if this young man had any way to bridge the gap between them.

"Olen nälkäinen."

He looked at her, just staring for a moment before opening his mouth. "Olenal... kinen?"

She tried again. "Olen nälkäinen." She made sure to draw out every sound for him. He seemed to like it better this time, but still shook his head. Nagisa moved on to something else. "Dwi'n llwglyd." He shook his head again. If she was remembering these correctly, she was telling him that she was hungry, but it didn't look like her message was getting through. She wasn't really hungry anyway, but she could stand for something to eat.

She was beginning to wonder if it was worth the time to try and communicate with him.

* * *

The argument had been short and indecipherable, with neither one arguing capable of actually understanding a word coming out of the other's mouth, save the few words Erman had learned from Nagisa. He was pretty sure this was about the beds. His first clue was that she'd started throwing a fit when their beds were put in the same room. He sincerely hoped this wasn't because of some cultural taboo that might ultimately break her trust in him.

She took out the new pad of paper he'd gotten her. He'd thought it was a great idea, considering the adhesive backing. She could label things for him, and had already done so with the front door and the blank walls. This time was different, and it looked like she was going back to her original language, the one she'd shouted at him the first day they met before she started using the even simpler one.

She wrote "馬鹿" and promptly stuck it to his forehead. He really hoped this wasn't some form of ritual curse.

Nagisa proceeded to write something else, and then stuck it on her bed. It read "渚のベッド". She wrote another one and stuck it on his bed. This one said "馬鹿のベッド" She then pointed to his bed and yelled at him. Then she pointed at him and continued yelling. It devolved very quickly into just repeating the one word over and over, increasingly frantic. Part of him wanted to know what 'baka' meant, but the rest of him really didn't.

There was a small meal for the evening, and Erman stood on the porch to watch the last fading light of the day. He could hear the rain starting to fall. Their evening meal would hold him over until the light returned, so he decided he would turn in for some sleep. Walking up the stairs, he quietly stepped into the bedroom. Nagisa was already there, but she didn't seem terribly happy. She saw him and immediately started pantomiming something to him. She traced a big square with her fingers and then made a waving gesture towards her bed.

It took him a few moments to figure out what she wanted, but then he realized she was complaining about something the bed lacked that her previous bed, in the government facility, had on it. A blanket. There was no way to know what kind of blanket she wanted, or if blankets were like beds and all of them were just called blankets. There was a blanket in the back, but it was old and made of a plastic material. It was for keeping crops, tools, or machinery dry overnight, not for keeping people secure in bed.

He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I don't have what you want. We can look for one tomorrow, but we should sleep for now. You'll be fine one time." She calmed down, but her body language told him she wasn't happy about it. It looked to him like she was able to tell from his tone that he wanted to help, but just couldn't. He let out a low sigh, wishing he could help her, but mostly wishing he knew exactly what she wanted. It didn't matter right now, though. It was time for bed.

Nagisa sat on her bed, then rolled onto her back and just lay there, staring at the ceiling. She mumbled something that he couldn't hope to understand. She looked over to see Erman taking off his clothes, and immediately turned bright red. She rolled over, facing the wall beside her bed, and frantically shouting things. He couldn't even tell what she was shouting at or about, so he assumed she was still upset about the blanket. There was nothing he could do about it right now, so he finished taking off his clothes and lay down on his bed. He watched her for a moment, but it looked like she was just going to sleep with her clothes on. He reached over and flicked off the glowing lamp that lit the room, casting it in darkness.

* * *

Nagisa hadn't intended to fall asleep like that, but she had eventually, curled up on the hard bed in a pitch black room. She was pretty sure there were no pajamas for him to have changed into, but didn't know if he'd only stripped down to his underwear. Of course, she had no idea if the people of this world had underwear. If she had to guess, she'd say yes, because she'd gotten some, but it might only be the women.

All the same, when she woke up it was still totally black in the room. She remembered that this room had no windows, so she got up and stumbled her way to the door, walking out and slowly making her way down the stairs and to the front door. She opened it to look outside and find that it was almost as dark outside. There was some barely visible faint glow coming from somewhere up above, but not enough to illuminate anything. She could barely see her own hand less than a foot in front of her eyes. All she could discern was that there was something with mass blocking out what little light was coming from the sky.

She knew the porch had a roof over it, keeping her dry so long as she didn't step out onto the stairs, but that meant she couldn't see where the light was coming from. While there was no light in the chilling cold night, there was the constant near-deafening roar of the rain falling. With the low temperature, she was surprised it wasn't hail or sleet, or even snow. Not that she could see it to confirm it really wasn't sleet.

Nagisa wrapped her arms around herself and sat down on the porch, listening to the rain. She hadn't really been all that tired. Being what she was, it would probably take a lot more to tire her out. Still, she thought, she was pretty sure that she'd slept for a good eight hours. There was no sign of light. She began to wonder how long this planet's day/night cycle was.

Getting a little wet wasn't too much of a problem. She wanted to know where that light was coming from. Nagisa stuck her head out from under the roof and looked up at the raining sky. The rain immediately soaked her, getting in her eyes. It was freezing cold and relentless. There was no way she could keep her eyes open long enough to get a good look at anything. She stepped back under the roof and just stood there, dripping in cold and wet misery in the absolute darkness. There had to be something she could do in the darkness.

She was pretty sure the cold, the wet, and the dark weren't enough to stop her. She stepped out into the rain again, this time she went all the way. She set her bare feet down on the squishy, muddy ground and started walking. Every step, her feet sunk into the mud several inches. She managed, by sheer strength, to pull herself forward. It was hard going, with the rain pounding on her from every direction and her feet getting stuck every step of the way, but she was counting her time and keeping track of her directions. If she started to feel like she wouldn't be able to make it much farther, she would turn back. She knew the way.

She had counted to just over half an hour, and nothing of her environment had changed. The light was still just the one faint glow that she couldn't look for. The mud was no softer, and she sunk no deeper, and the rain was not letting up. Another five minutes, and she felt the dirt under her feet change. Whatever it was made up of was slightly different, and she didn't sink in quite as far, but pulling herself out again was much harder. She remembered the direction she'd taken, straight down the driveway, so she guessed she'd finally reached the road. In only a few dozen steps further, she reached the other side of the road. The farmland here belonged to someone else. It was in use.

Nagisa reached out and caught a stalk of some corn-like crop. It stood up remarkably well in the rain, and when she pulled on it she found that it stayed together very well. She used it to pull herself forward, grabbing the next one and continuing that way. She could still find her way back. She knew that for sure. She still knew that an hour later, who knows how far into the field, when nothing had changed. She could keep on walking, forever it seemed, and never find anything. But then, for all she knew, there was something only a few more steps ahead. It was time to turn back. It would start getting light by the time she got back to the farmhouse, unless this world had nights that were unreasonably long. She couldn't imagine they were so long that someone would die of dehydration between sunset and sunrise. It had easily been ten hours now.

How long could the night be?


	17. And In Case I Don't See You

This was ridiculous.

Nagisa had made it all the way back to the farmhouse. Her sense of direction had not failed her. She let the rain wash all the mud off of her, and then sat under the porch for a while. It had now been no less than eighteen hours of dark. Nothing had changed at all. Eventually, she got up and went back in, making her way up the stairs and back to her bed, laying down and going back to sleep. She wondered if this darkness would ever end.

* * *

The darkness ended seven hours later, two hours after the rain finally stopped. The world outside the house became light as day in the course of two minutes, as it did every morning. Erman woke up to find Nagisa still fast asleep. She was an odd girl, for sure, if she was still asleep while it was light out. He got himself dressed and, turning back to look at her, found himself getting a bit worried that she was sleeping too long. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, shaking her a little. To his surprise, she slowly opened her eyes and looked up at him. He let out a sigh of relief.

The two of them went downstairs, and Erman headed outside. Nagisa stayed at the doorway, peering out into the morning. It was light now, and the ground looked dry. She couldn't even see any footprints from the night before. She shook her head and retreated back into the house. Erman wasn't sure why she was acting this way, but he wanted to find out, so he followed her back in.

Inside, in the house's main room, he had set up several things that he thought might help them communicate. There was a sand pad in the corner, a small table with a raised edge and a thin layer of sand in it. They would use it for writing words and messages that could be easily erased, to save on paper for that ongoing operation. There was also a canvas, large sheets of paper affixed to a wooden frame, and some graphite sticks to draw with. He hoped that he could find her words for things by drawing the thing, and that way he could learn her words for things he couldn't physically show her.

There were other things set up, and more that he hadn't had the time to set up just yet, but those were the two she'd made use of. She wrote that word, 'baka', in the sand, and then proceeded to start drawing on the canvas. It was certainly curious to watch, as she was sketching something in the bottom corner. When she finished and took a step back, he could see that she'd drawn some kind of house. It wasn't any house he knew in particular, but it was a house. A very crudely drawn house. She then leaned in and made a line across the bottom of the paper that went behind the house. Along that line, away from the house, she made several short lines sticking straight up, with little specks all over their tops. It looked like the crops around a farm.

He pointed to those lines. "Crops? Grain?"

She ignored him, instead drawing a vehicle next to the house. This one looked more specific, clearly supposed to look like the truck that had visited them the previous day, belonging to the old man Derek. There were flaws with her memory of it, but it was clear enough that he could tell. Once that was done, she placed the graphite at the top of the paper, on its side, and dragged its entire length down to the line. She left a little border of smudgy white around everything she'd already drawn, in order to make it all visible, but now almost the entire paper was blackish gray with graphite.

It was the night sky.

Nagisa set about removing tiny little dots of graphite all over the blackness of the sky, so that white speckled the black. He had no idea what those were supposed to be. She suddenly pulled the sheet of paper off the frame and set up the next one. This time, she started by drawing a circle. She drew strange designs and shapes on it. He couldn't see that the shapes had any discernible pattern to them. It was just lines that barely stayed straight for the slightest distance, and there were no curves that made any sense either. Near as he could tell, it was chaotic and random, but she put so much thought and detail into it that there had to be a purpose. It was like she was remembering it.

She shaded in a large portion of the circle lightly, then went to work on the rest of the sheet, adding smaller circles here and there, then a number of tiny spots all over. She then shaded in everything that wasn't inside the circles until it was dark and almost black. She finally stepped back and pointed to the various circles, addressing them with names that he had no basis for understanding. These were things to her, things with names that she knew and understood well, but he had no idea what they were supposed to be. It was either some primitive creation of ancient minds that had to come up with answers for questions they didn't understand, or it was a representation of something beyond his own ability to comprehend. Either he was way beyond her, or she was way beyond him.

Erman pointed to the drawing. "I don't know... what this is. I don't know how to tell you that, but if you can show me how to understand this, I would really appreciate it. You just... work with this. I'll get us something to eat."

It was nearly an hour before he was done preparing the food, which he brought out to Nagisa on a tray and set down on the table beside her. She looked at it briefly, then handed him one of the papers she'd finished with. Setting down his own food, he looked over the paper. There was a depiction of another house, with the truck next to it again, so he understood the size. Next to the house was a tower. She'd set it up so that this tower was gigantic, bigger than anything he'd ever seen save for the capital building. The next paper had more towers, drawn side by side. There were dozens of them, clearly meant to be hundreds of feet tall. He couldn't imagine why she'd decided to draw so many of them all so close together.

Paper after paper made him question more and more about where she had come from. The next one depicted the towers again, only this time they were smaller. It showed them farther away, in the distance, all clustered together in a vast open countryside. If these were meant to be the same buildings, then this scenery was beyond anything he knew to be possible. It stretched on seemingly for miles, hundreds of miles even. The next paper showed the countryside turning to desert on one side, with the tiny city barely visible, huge jagged rock formations in the distance, and the countryside falling to cliffs in the other direction. At the bottom of the cliffs was water. She drew the water on another paper, and endless sea of water, along miles of coastline. It was unbelievable.

Then she handed him a paper that showed the coastline from above. There was seemingly no end to the water or the land. No edge. He couldn't imagine how to contain such a biosphere. She picked up the second picture she had drawn, tracing her fingers along the random pattern lines inside the strange circles, then pointing to the picture of the water meeting the land. Could it be that he was looking at another kind of world, something beyond the walls he knew? It was time, he decided, to find out what she thought was normal.

Erman grabbed Nagisa's hand before she could start drawing another picture and pulled her out the front door. "I know you can't understand me, but there's something I want to check." He figured whoever owned the farmland across the road wouldn't mind if they were just there to look around, so he led her across the road and through the field of crops. He realized he was following a trail of broken crops that hadn't been there the day before. There was no way to know who could have been responsible, so he put it out of his mind. After a short while of walking in a straight line through the field, he found the other edge. It was the nearest point he could find the land met the border.

Nagisa stopped when she saw the border. She held Erman back, her eyes scanning the oddity of nature before her. Seemingly in the center of the field, the world stopped. At the very edge, there was a steel frame wall. The frame was only exposed for the first meter above ground, after which it was covered by a thick shell that acted like a massive screen, displaying the blue sky above them. The screen wall went up into a massive dome that covered the entire district. The sky was fake.

Nagisa reached out and brushed her fingers against the screen wall. "The world is hollow... and I have touched the sky."

The man that accompanied her looked at her, clearly wondering what she had said. Nagisa knew he couldn't understand her words, and now she saw that he really didn't understand her entire concept of the universe. It was just as she had suspected, from the moment she saw his reaction to her drawings. They were foreign to him. The very idea of a world with an open sky was foreign to him. Wherever they were, in some sort of biosphere, closed off from the rest of the universe, he didn't know you could go outside. She had to learn to communicate with him. She had to find out why they were closed off from the rest of the universe.

Then maybe she could find out where the others were.

* * *

"_I can't beat this thing on my own..._"

A roiling mass of blood red teeth and eyes crawled along an endless gray surface. It swiped a long tentacle, tipped by sharp fangs, aiming to scar the surface and break it open. There was little effect, so it moved on to the next area. There would be a weak spot eventually, and it would find it. It was not short on time. Several of its eyes looked behind it at the shadowy figure following several hundred kilometers behind.

"**Vanish, speck.**"

"_Never. Wherever my friends are, I must protect them from your vile evil._"

"**Very well. Whenever you have fully healed, you may challenge me again. The result will be no different. How long before you've healed up again? Another ten thousand years? Perhaps I shall find my way in before then. What will you do?**"

Helmet cracked, tail torn, armored bent and marred, cape shredded and sword broken, Oktavia von Seckendorff clenched and shook her fists at the Blood Mad God of The Void. "_I will defeat you. I will destroy you. There is no other choice!_"

"**Then perhaps I shall end your miserable existence before you heal. You are not such entertainment to me to be worth keeping around.**" Uvhash swiped his clawed tentacles at the next spot. A tiny spot on the surface broke open, and air started pouring out into the darkness of space. "**Finally.**"

Oktavia lifted her shattered sword and charged the massive beast. "_You'll have to kill me first!_"


End file.
